This article is a part of a series in which the Financial Times asks leading commentators and policymakers what to expect from a post-Covid-19 future

The writer, author of ‘The Technology Trap’, is the Oxford Martin Citi Fellow and directs the Future of Work programme at the Oxford Martin School

Historically, depressions have inflamed automation anxiety. Wars, in contrast, often end them. In the US, the machinery debates of the 1920s and 30s began with labour secretary James J. Davis’s famous 1927 speech. Yet panic only set in during the Depression, and only faded with US entry into the second world war. As Covid-19 is often described as a warlike event, and one that has also tipped the world into recession, will it end or exacerbate our automation concerns?