Rainbow over Athabasca River, Athabasca River, Jasper National Park, Canada

As the World Health Organization (WHO) and governments around the world go to war against the coronavirus pandemic, we are warned it could continue for longer than most of us expect or are prepared for. Experts believe that a vaccination is a minimum of 12 to 18 months away.

Our world may not return to normal for some time.

It is not the first time that we are seeing a global disease pandemic and it certainly won't be the last. Our modern world creates outbreaks like coronavirus. The coronavirus pandemic is a direct outcome of excessive activity over and beyond the capacity of our human and environmental ecosystem.

Our excessive existence is a hotly debated point. From the ecological crisis we are creating from carbon emissions and dumping plastic in the oceans, to the disproportionate wealth gap being created by modern U.S. style democratic capitalism, the warning signs are abundant.

We have a global health crisis on our hands which is creating a financial crisis and creating a crisis for humanity of unfathomable comprehension to most of us.

Governments call for social distancing and ask citizens to stay at home, blunt but effective tools in the fight against coronavirus contagion. There is a global shortage of coronavirus testing facilities . Health workers are struggling to be tested and there is a global shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) like gloves, masks and gowns, oxygen machines, and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds.

The unintended consequences of the health crisis are ravaging the economy by shutting down businesses of all shapes and sizes, leaving business owners without income and large swathes of the population unemployed, with US unemployment claims hitting a record three million last week. For many citizens the only option is awaiting financial support from the government or the benevolence of family and hoping that next month, maybe things will return to normal.

To survive through the pandemic we are developing new ways of living: working and schooling, collaborating and connecting, and being productive remotely using digital tools and the network.

To thrive through the pandemic we are using our innate human instincts with great acts of courage and benevolence: from front line health workers risking their lives to volunteers to support health systems; industry re-purposing production facilities to community acts of kindness; governments offering to do whatever it takes to support business and citizens to keep the economy going, having come to an abrupt stop for many sectors.

The human spirit prevails and there is good news emerging amongst this deluge of bad news.

Navroop Sahdev is working on rebooting the economy to put humanity at the centre of our technologically driven world.

Sahdev is the founder & CEO ofThe Digital Economistand fellow atMIT Connection Science, and is calling for the global economy to transition to digital-first systems with a marked separation from our physical resources. The reboot is required for humanity to better thrive to build and grow with our innate creativity without constantly overstepping the planetary resource boundaries.

Our resources are limited but we keep creating more money. Two things happen as a result: the worth of money declines. The more there is, the more there needs to be for it to be valuable and, ever mounting pressure on resources to a point of collapse. Money cant rescue anything at that point. Then its not about the economy, its about peoples lives. The current coronavirus pandemic is a case in point, says Sahdev.

With the taxpayer as the lender of last resort, we are not just paying for the bail out of our businesses, we are paying to bail out ourselves. Governments in the West have turned on their Central Bank money printing machines and we are creating new mountains of debt, and to what end. Is the government going to become the ultimate guarantor of capitalism using taxpayers dollars?

We need to stop fighting resource wars among ourselves and against nature. Money and technology are tools weve created that need to serve us. And if it is humanity versus nature, nature is going to win. Every single time. Fundamentally, money is a claim on resources. A claim on energy spent somewhere in the system. But with digital infrastructure, we can transition away from burning physical energy in the system and confine it to the digital domain.

"The COVID-19 pandemic is not a rare event; with the ever-increasing level of global connectivity and interdependence, the so-called black swan events are a property of the system. Given the complex nature of the planetary ecosystem, the probability of the occurrence of such large-scale events is increasing.

"I see the current crisis as a catalyst for therebooting of the global economyby retooling towards a human-centered, rather than a capital-centered, socio-economic and technological build out. In the short term, its about rescuing the global economy that governments in the world are rushing to do, says Sahdev.

So where do we go from here? What must happen to both contain and avoid such global catastrophic events with loss of life? Are governments now consigned to the role of protecting entire populations, businesses and markets?

Professor Alex Pentland, Director of MIT Connection Science responds, We need to transition from nation-wide centralized systems where everyone goes to headquarters to pitch their idea and get resources, or we fashion one regulation for everyone in the whole nation, to alliances of small communities connected mainly by digital infrastructure. This transformation preserves the human, face-to-face contact and respects local conditions, while still enabling widespread cooperation.

Crisis situations are the best times to the hit restart button. We can start by going fully digital.

There is too much stress on our physical systems and the carrying capacity of the ecosystem and this leaves an intrinsic dichotomy between the laws of the natural world, which optimizes for the system as a whole over time, and our evolution as a utility maximizing species.

Many of these digital tools exist already. We just need to start using them with much more urgency and social acceptance. We can start from a different starting point, there are many discussions that have ignited with the a Fed Digital Dollar to help overcome the COVID-19 crisis.

Most immediately we need to start by enabling such a transition to take place by building native digital infrastructure while ensuring basic life sustaining resource are available for everyone like: universal basic income and healthcare (nine million people die of hunger in the world each year, even though there is even food in the world); and, activating global decentralized networks in response to global challenges by correctly designing human incentives, like the outstandingRed Ballon challengewon by MIT, says Sahdev.

Sahdev talks about imagination, the highest human faculty, and firmly believes in our ability to build better technological and socio-economic systems, thanks to the urgency created by the coronavirus pandemic.

If digital abundance can be separated from physical scarcity, it may allow both conservation and regeneration of the physical resources and allowing humans to unleash their animal spirits in the virtual world: health systems, financial systems, energy systems, food systems, supply chains, you name it.

When talking about digital infrastructure, its not as much about the technology itself, its about ending the resource war. Technology is how we arrived at this point and technology is how we will free ourselves from the trap we are ultimately laying, threatening our very existence on the planet, says Sahdev.

See the article here:

Rebooting The Global Economy After Coronavirus: Physical Scarcity To Digital Abundance - Forbes