Re:Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable hou...
by nradov on Monday October 23, 2017 @06:48PM
(#15537569)
You seem to think this is inevitable, but everything you described is highly speculative. There is no evidence that working habits will change as you predict. Plus a significant fraction of people find it impossible to work in cars due to motion sickness.
Re:Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable hou...
by riot504 on Monday October 23, 2017 @05:04PM
(#15536923)
Why do we even need to get into any transportation system, why not work remotely 90% of the time?
Re:Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable hou...
by WalterSear on Monday October 23, 2017 @05:11PM
(#15536961)
Why don't we work remotely 90% of the time already?
There are deep seated biological and cultural reasons why current technologies don't replace physical proximity.
Some of the more important ones, such as networking, remote technologies can't even try to address. It's terrible for job seeking, lateral career changes and building connections.
Re:Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable hou...
by Apocryphon on Monday October 23, 2017 @08:03PM
(#15538053)
Maybe VR/AR offices are the future. Certainly they'd present less legislative and social hurdles than self-driving cars.
I'll arrive at work at 11 for my first meeting, having gotten a solid 1.5 hours of uninterrupted work done already, and be wrapping up any collaboration in order to return to my mobile cubicle by 4.
Of course, I'll still be available via skype. The morning stand up may happen while everyone is leaving their driveway.
Soon enough this new daily routine is going to be about as disruptive to productivity in the office as taking lunch, since almost everyone with a car will taking advantage of it. The start and ends of business days are going to become 'private', with people keeping their heads down, and interacting via video and chat/mail as the norm, with face-to-face work performed during the middle of the day.
We may even have to do away with lunchtimes as we know them, since they take away from prime face-to-face work time. Or perhaps, with all the other communication going on, daily team-bonding time over food might be one of few on going reasons for direct interactions.
And vehicles are going to start being designed to be really comfortable to work/play in. Every mid-morning, people are going to have to choose between getting up from the work they are stuck into and moving to the desk in their office, or staying focused on the task at hand. Eventually, people are going to start choosing the privacy and comfort of their car over the relative space of a cubicle, and more and more people are going to start working from the parking lot. Companies may even start expecting a portion of their workforce to bring their own vehicles, in the manner of 'bring your own device' and alter/reduce their use of offices.
Of course, things could go the other way: in the city, you'll want to the car to go pick up the groceries and do errands, and then find a in a nice empty shaded spot out of town for the day, and to find a new spot if anyone sketchy shows up.
This is just one tiny, tiny change as we move from a civilizations of vehicles to a civilization of intelligent transport. Cars and buses are about to be replaced by the equivalent of very small mobile homes/buildings.