Imagine a surgeon being able to control a robotic surgery tool from the comforts of his/her home, where you have to have extremely low-latency or guaranteed low-latency networks. Or imagine mecheng offices running simulation jobs in the cloud or an on-premises instead of each having a workstation, and being able to cluster that compute together. All these have been possible to some degree with existing technology, but now we have a paradigm shift and market acceptance that unlocks new business possibilities.
Is it? Looking around, it seems average visual reaction times (VRTs) are on the order of 250 ms, and even the fastest VRTs are well over 100 ms. A study looking specifically at medical students for auditory and visual reaction times ("A comparative study of visual and auditory reaction times on the basis of gender and physical activity levels of medical first year students" [1]) also seems to support those numbers in the medical context, and while experienced surgeons could be expected to be somewhat faster that paper also links to research indicating hard biological minimums:
>"Researches by Kemp show that an auditory stimulus takes only 8–10 ms to reach the brain, but on the other hand, a visual stimulus takes 20-40 ms."
If we want to be quite conservative and aim to keep latency to single digit ms, so sub-10ms, then the speed of light in standard fiber gives us an RTT limit of around 1300 miles. Going more conservative and assuming actual route having to essentially follow the legs of a right triangle, that still gives a radius of around 460 miles, with a set of reasonably conservative assumptions. That seems plenty good enough to cover an enormous amount of work-from-home (or at least work-from-different-location) when it comes to actual existing medical practices, where I doubt most doctors at hospitals live >460 miles away.
I would agree that there are real issues with the idea, but more in terms of the risks events like network disruptions than the speed of light.
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You argued that when we compare the average VRT additional latency is not large. But you should have argued that there was enough buffer between average VRTs and the time needed for a surgeon to react to allow adding to average VRT.
i.e. If we imagine driving a car with a video camera, we don't really care about latency vs reaction time. We care whether latency + reaction < accident threshold.
If you look at the paper I linked, it includes not just the mean but the standard deviation, which is on the order of 10-20ms. That means we are already by definition accepting that kind of variability regardless does it not? If +/- 10ms was critical, it'd imply we should be filtering for that already but it doesn't appear that's the case at all. Furthermore, hunting around for other research on the subject indicates far higher variability than that is also introduced by standard stress factors (lack of sleep, overload, distractions, etc). All of which are strongly present in existing medical practice as well. To the extent working remotely might reduce some of those it could in principle even effectively cancel out a 10ms penalty.
I stand by saying it's not at all clear that sub-10ms (or potentially even higher) would at all be the critical factor preventing remote work. Speed of light seems to be far less important then factors like total network disruption, robotics reliability, etc.
Mecheng tasks could be async / queue-based and latency wouldn't matter too much.
Regardless, I think it's really important to keep your bias for action high during this period of time.
that's totally a thing. worked on low-latency, high resolution remoting software for this purpose exactly. Buy a bunch of beefy servers and have scientists remote in from a laptop to run graphic intensive simulations, rather than buy a workstation for everyone.
I wonder how much this costs: https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/
I'm currently experiencing this. I live near my office and have sufficiently fast home internet. But connecting to the company network and attempting to work on a machine remotely is very painful. Working locally and commiting or accessing mail is still painful, but managable.
Also, this could catalyze a shift to people doing more things remotely. But will that reduce oil consumption significantly? Don't forget about induced demand.
Right now, I can head down the freeway in what used to be rush hour without any traffic. If that persists for any length of time, people will start buy McMansions on former farmland until the freeways get packed back up again. They will perhaps order their products that will be produced with petroleum in China, and shipped on container ships, and trucked to Amazon facilities, and then delivered in gas-burning vans.
I think as long as the economy keeps growing oil consumption will keep growing, until something cheaper than oil comes along (either through technological breakthrough or subsidy).
Increased use for transporting goods is plausible, but generally it is more efficient than transporting people.
For most products, lower oil price might not contribute much to lowering its manufacturing cost, only for logistics, so it's unclear how much induced demand will apply to finished goods.
Transportation accounts for 69% of US petroleum consumption. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
Energy use (from all sources) per unit of GDP has slowly declined over the years.
However, those cash reserves will quickly burn though. And the worst part is a lot of Houston's economy is buttressed by oilfield services companies, which make all their money off drilling new fracking wells.
Right now, it makes 0 sense to drill new fracking wells (-40 sense, to be more accurate), and they have big loans on billions of dollars worth of equipment.
It's gonna hurt soon, and it's going to hurt very bad.
We're already starting to see some of this, but it's also getting swept up with the pandemic lockdown, so it's hard to tell one apart from the other ATM, except that oilfield services are shedding employees quicker than other large firms, anecdotally.
Edit: it's worth noting that while the last downturn was heavily impactful on the energy, manufacturing, and real estate sectors, the recovery was pretty quick as the overall impact to the economy was about 1.6% down, and the rest of the overall economy was booming.
Of course the automotive market in general is "non-typical" at the moment, so there are probably multiple interpretations to be made of whatever the market status is.
I recall seeing CBC news articles about all of the cars and trucks left abandoned in the parking lots of the Edmonton and Calgary airports. All of the out-of-province workers just split once the pickings became poor. Cheap Tacoma trucks for a year or two, I regret not picking one up off of Kijiji (aka Canadian Craigslist) while I had the chance...
Even if they all declared bankruptcy, their infrastructure would still be there. I'd imagine someone would buy it and bring it back online if/when prices recover.
This not factoring in the structural changes to demand like electrification, and who knows what kind of energy transition stimulus money could be deployed in the coming quarters to kick start things back.
I am thinking it is of ever increasing likelihood that the “most oil consumed in a day ever” in human history could actually behind us.
It just happened to coincide with the pandemic. Though I'd guess by now the pandemic adds fuel to the non-fire.
Saudi/Russia likely did not anticipate a global lockdown and decided to get into a price war to keep their absolute revenue numbers stable albeit by increasing production under reduced prices ,that has of course backfired spectacularly.
There might be some semi-permanent change in people's behaviors if the epidemic continues for many months. Many people will form a habit of doing more things at home/online: more takeouts, more online shopping, live/recorded video classes, virtual meetings, telehealth, etc. Better online services will also spring up to support the habits/practices.
Since online activities often save time, the new habits could become a new equilibrium: people/companies who adopt them will often have an economic advantage, influencing others to do the same. Thus, oil demand could be significantly diminished long-term as well.