those are called “trains.” We have them.
My job doesn’t require physical presence at all. In fact, I am about 1000km from the nearest team member (my manager’s manager). The nearest team member I actually have meetings with is in another continent, some 7000km away (both distances according to Google). And yet, HR insists that I have to go into the office every day, go figure.
I’ve found that there is great value in having some degree of physical presence. We have off-site team members, and they generally have lower productivity than local ones. Or more accurately, team members that do not have regular physical proximity with other members have lower productivity than the rest.
But 100% local isn’t necessary. I already have only ~60% overlap with the others due to my preference for late hours. That’s more than enough to take care of those issues that are most efficiently handled in person.
At any rate, you certainly have a point that not all businesses have gotten the memo that some work flexibility in hours is ok. Hopefully that will change over time as well.
It will be more like 8 hours at work and 90 minutes in the car each way answering emails from your boss and doing the urgent jobs they threw at you as you walked out the door.
Are they factoring in the costs of adjustment to climate change, consequent population movements, resource conflicts, etc., etc…? Not to mention consequential changes in tastes and aspirations…
Or are they just assuming all aspects of the external environment will remain the same for the foreseeable?
For some people, sure. But these people are already answering email at home and have a pretty shitty work-life balance. Hard to imagine that self-driving cars would make this worse. Happily, I’m able to leave my work at the office.
No, being forced to be at work 12 hours a day is a shitty work life balance. Checking on email at home lets you anticipate stuff for the next day, and is especially useful if you work with people on the other side of the globe. Being forced to would be bad. Choosing to is different.
At least that’s what we do in Silicon Valley.
You previously mentioned “more like 8 hours at work and 90 minutes in the car each way”. And sure, there are people with such brain-damaged management that this will happen. But these people are already working the extra hours, either at work or at home via VPN. So nothing will get worse for them.
For less brain-damaged companies, people can already negotiate various forms of flex hours, whether 4-10 weeks, or 2 days telecommute/3 days on-site, workday timeshifting, or otherwise. Self-driving cars will enable a new form of flex hours where a significant portion of the workweek is spent in the car. There’s no reason to believe that work hours will increase when clueful management is present.
Another thought: if all these technological changes mean certain types of job disappear, and others increasingly depend on forcing down labour costs in a “gig economy” of casualisation, zero hours contracts and self-employment - at what point does economic activity actually slow down for lack of money in the general mass of the population?
What these futurists always forget, and what has been largely overlooked in this thread, is that the “cost of living” increases with the standard of living.
chappachula doesn’t think we’re much closer to “the future” than we wer ein the 1960s, because “back in the 60’s the cost of living was low enough that most families only needed one wage earner.” That is true enough, but overlooks the standard of living of the 1960s.
A family today could live in a 1,600 sq ft house with a 13 cubic ft fridge, a B & W cathode ray TV with no remote control, no air conditioning, a singel land line telephone, no internet and a single 7 year old car that is maintained by the household and never serviced by a mechanic. The adults could eat out once every 3 months, the children once every two years. The kids could wear hand me downs and have 5 possessions worth more than 1 hour’s wages and so forth.
That would be 1966 living, and that family could still readily live on a single wage.
But nobody wants to live like that. We demand slightly more these days. And when most of the trends on the OP have come to pass, we will also want more. People demand higher and higher standards of comfort. A cell phone or internet connection was a luxury item 20 years ago. They are seen as necessities for 10 YOs today. As a result of that sort of mindset the “cost of living” is higher than it was 20 years ago. And when we have the flying cars of the OP, people will still aspire to whatever the (unguessable) equivalent of a cell phone or internet connection is.
The average home in 1950 was 1000 sq ft, now it is 2500 sq ft. Plus back in the 1920s it wasn’t uncommon to have 10 people living in one apartment, with multiple people living in one room. If you are comfortable living the way people did in the 1920s (walk everywhere, share an apartment, basic food, etc) you can probably live just fine on $200/month or less.
Having said that, I think another big thing that factors into our increased lifestyle is things like health care, education, pensions for the elderly and disabled, etc. When you look at what % of GDP in both public and private terms goes to these things, it is something like 18% for health care, maybe 8% for education, probably 10-15% for pensions and private spending for the elderly & disabled. Back in the 1920s we spent far less for these things, now they make up almost 40% of the economy.
Exactly so. Living the lifestyle of a blue collar worker in the 1950s with a good job at the factory is very easy. Small house, one shitty car, no cable, no internet, a phone that is bolted to the kitchen wall and only makes local calls. If you get cancer the doctors tell you to go home and spend your last six months with your family. You have only one set of good clothes that you only wear once a week to go to church or for funerals. You have a washing machine, but dry your clothes on a line in the back yard, your kids get one or two sets of new clothes a year and the rest is hand-me-downs. The most expensive item your kids own is their shoes, which have to be replaced once a year. You wash dishes by hand, and the only device in your kitchen that plugs into an electrical socket is the toaster. Your house has two bedrooms, one for the parents and the baby, the other for the rest of the kids to share, one bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and the only insulation is an asbestos-sprayed ceiling.
And on and on. We don’t recognize that as middle class living anymore, because the standards of middle class living have grown considerably. You could lead that lifestyle in the 1950s and be respected as a responsible adult. In 2016 you’d be looked down on as barely scraping by.
How odd that I never realized at 15 how underprivileged I was. Our house had three bedrooms, and was built in 1951. My house now was built in '53, and had 3 bedrooms and ample family space before it was added on to.
Most everyone I knew back then had one landline with several extensions. No remote on the TV, but with only 7 channels in New York, you didn’t really need one. By 1966 plenty of middle class families had color TV. We didn’t have tons of money, but we ate out more than once every few months - and at considerably better than fast food restaurants too. Back then people bought cars more frequently than they do now. And I had a lot more than five possessions.
Not having a microwave, computer, DVD player and CD player was hardly a negative in 1966. Neither was not paying a bundle for a cellphone.
On the plus side, very few people went around in constant fear of getting laid off at a moments notice. That’s worth a lot of cellphone time.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make.
The size of the average US house in any given year is a fact, not an anecdote, and can be readily found with a google search. The same for almost all the other points I made. I don’t dispute that you knew “plenty” of middle class people with color TVs in 1966. But the fact is thatover 90% of US households did not own a color TV. I also don’t dispute everyone you knew ate out at good restaurants very week, all the kids owned expensive toys and so forth.
But that wasn’t the average. I won’t say that you were privileged or overprivileged or underprivileged. Those terms tend to be pejorative and aren’t very enlightening. But by the standards that I listed in my post, your had a standard of living that was above average. That’s not a value judgement, it’s simply a fact. Over 50% of Americans had a lower standard of living than you did, and by some measure 90% of Americans did. What your personal recollections of 1966 may be is rather irrelevant to what the facts say about the average standard of living in 1966.
As far as living in a house built C1951, I have no idea what you think that means. We know for a fact what the average house size was in 1950. The size of the houses you lived in doesn’t change that fact.
And what the chances of being laid off have to do with the cost of a cell phone eludes me.
The point is that the cost of living in 1960 was lower than today. Yes, the standard of living was also lower…but that’s irrelevant.
This thread began claiming that a magical singularity will soon drive the cost of living down to zero.
Then somebody said that people have been predicting lower cost of living ever since Walt Disney.
Then I said that the cost of living was already lower in the 1960’s than today,(evidence: one salary was enough.)
Then people said that I’m wrong because in the 60’s people had smaller houses and no color TV.
Then Blake said, no, in the 60’s he had a color TV and a big house.
Then you said “I have no idea what point you are trying to make”
Well…The point is that one salary was enough to live on the 1960’s. (whether your family owned a color TV or not).
Yes, people has less stuff, but that’s irrelevant.
Several posts have said “but -horror of horrors—in the 60’s people only had one TV, and no clothes dryer.” This implies that if we today went back to that standard of living, we could -today- also live well on one salary.
And that’s the point that I claim is not true.
A dryer or a color TV were expensive in 1960; today you can get 'em cheap at Walmart, or free on craigslist. Giving up your modern appliances today will not suddenly make it possible for a family to live well on one salary.
Yes houses were smaller back then, children shared a room. But the important fact is that a single salary in 1960 was enough to buy a house on a private lot of land. Today, …not so much.*
For a 60’s factory worker supporting a family, layoffs were not a terrible worry. There was job security, and life was pretty good, even without a cell phone.
*(And, even if you want to meet today’s expectations: Adding an extra bedroom back then wouldn’t add much to the price of construction. The house would still be affordable to a blue-collar worker.The houses were small, not due to financial limitations, but because of cultural factors–people just expected kids to share a room,and parents didn’t mind sharing the bathroom with the family.)
Lots of jobs already can, like tech support, data processing, and customer service. They’re currently being done overseas. That’s the thing about telecommuting - you can do it from anywhere. So what they predict is already happening, it’s just that the low cost of housing and such is in foreign countries. A pretty big percentage of people in the US would be working from home if the jobs had stayed in the US, like the article presupposes.
I think this is a bit US-centric. The US post WWII was in a sweet spot of economic dominance over the rest of the world. It should be treated as an exceptional period of plenty. The rest of the world was not so welll off.
Im quite sure automation shall improve our economic well-being, but probably not by as much as futurists predict. I also believe the economic and educational changes in China and India will vastly improve the world’s lot. Until recently the West was carrying the weight of the world’s R&D on it’s back. This weight is now being lifted partly by China, India and elsewhere. That’s an added 2.5 billion educated people now committed to our economic wealth, and roughly 2-5% of them mathematic eggheads, industrialists, scientists and CEO’s. Our human capital has increased vastly in the past generation or so. This is likely to be a huge positive for future generations.
This of course a rosey picture. It assumes China and India do not engage in a self destructive war, or, destruct in other ways.
Meh, been hearing that since the 60s. There’s also an opposite, dystopian view. Generally, technology improves the standard of living and lowers labor costs and leads to gushingly optimistic predictions like we’ll have two-day work weeks and vastly comfortable lifestyles. Additionally on the plus side, overall inflation rates are at record lows and may remain that way for the foreseeable future. The problem is that the opposite force is uncontrolled population growth.
There’s only so much land on which to grow crops, only so much land on which it’s practical to build housing, only so much water we can consume and pollute, only so many places we can dump our garbage, only so much ocean we can poison with chemicals and microplastics, only so much atmosphere we can pollute with toxins and CO2, and in the end, only so many resources we can extract to build all the new cars and houses and TVs and toys that we all incessantly demand.
For a good example of the above, just look at the cost of housing in the 60s. Sure, TVs are way cheaper and way better and we all have our own computers, but does that make up for it? Not by a long shot. I remember when one of my older relatives bought his first house in the 60s. It was a lovely new suburban home in a great neighborhood and cost about twice his annual salary. Today you can’t even buy a car for that amount. Today a typical house in many good areas might cost ten times a decent annual salary (and if you make that out to be more than a million dollars, let me add: in many cases, much more!). And since we all have to live somewhere, where is this marvelously reduced cost of living?
Not quite; many IT companies (including the one I work for) are now creating what they call “near shore centers”. Some of ours are in the US.
But the one in Spain isn’t in Madrid or Barcelona, the two locations which are first to pop up into people’s heads. It’s in Valladolid: regional capital, 2h from the Madrid airport by car (not much longer than if we were in downtown Madrid), cost of living is half that of Madrid and the housing market is reasonable. The same rent that in Madrid would get a shared room in a bad part of town gets a 3B2b in a good part of Valladolid… or in the majority of provincial capitals (exclude Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and San Sebastián).
Now, this company insists in having their remote workers work from their centers even if as in my case they don’t work from the same center as any other of their team members; if I didn’t have to be here? Shave 1/3 off my salary and I’d be happier than here. And they would have saved the moving bonus too!
All of that to approach zero? That alone tell me the author of the article is a fool.