The internet has had a remarkable impact on human life, creating powerful new ways in which people can interact. But business has been reluctant to abandon itself to the full scope of the internet’s potential, believing that close, ‘hands-on’ supervision of workers is essential for productivity.
COVID-19 has shown physically-present supervision is not necessarily needed at all. Workers can be as efficient, or even more efficient, working remotely.
Add robotics to this mix, where human hands are not needed at a particular site, replaced by mechanisms that can be manipulated from afar. The possibilities imply revolutionary possibilities in the way we live and work.
A farm in Saskatchewan Canada, might be managed entirely from suburban Paris, France, plowing and seeding fields using drone tractors that are controlled by drivers living on their houseboats in the West Indies. All of this is well within range of current technology.
A recent article in a computer magazine seeks to imagine possible new employment structures that would revolutionize physical and social relationships. It foresees less need for public transit and the private automobile. Meanwhile, the commercial buildings in city cores, no longer filled with workers, could be repurposed for social housing.
Read more in Computer Weekly: Remote working works – and can herald a post-pandemic social revolution
Our thought? The futurism of Computer Weekly‘s article if anything feels overly grounded in existing urban structures. Will the lessened need to be on-hand near a city core allow people to reclaim a national dream of home ownership in once-fashionable, now unfashionable, soon to be fashionable again, suburbs as core-gentrification trends slow, or reverse? Will sprawling suburbs no longer need to be supported by freeways and rail systems because nobody needs to get downtown any longer?
And will those empty downtown buildings become suitable social housing warehouses, as usual built in the wrong place at the wrong time, filled with low paid service workers who can only afford to bicycle to their jobs catering to higher paid workers who are back in their far-flung single-family suburban homes?
Stretch the internet out to a physical plant in Saskatchewan and a corporate headquarters in Paris coordinating skilled workers in the West Indies. The scope for imagination runs right off conventional urban rails.
