Reply to post: Re: At What Point...

Re: At What Point...

John 104,

The last couple of years has definitely demonstrated that "knowledge-workers" don't necessarily need to congregate in offices to get things done. As many things have gone paperless, all sorts of office work that still isn't automated and needs doing by humans can often be done off-site. A receptionist that answers the phone can be anywhere in the world and it can be a benefit for a company to be able to ship a new hire a pre-programmed secretarial VOIP phone and have a live attendant 24/7 in multiple time zones. Those receptionists can also be people that would need special accommodations to be able to come into an office that they already have installed at home.

The incredible advances in communications is begging to be used to change the way we do things and to be more efficient in how we do them. I'll date myself by saying my first computer that I owned was a Mac512KE upgraded to be functionally a MacPlus. My first hard drive that I saved and saved for was a whopping 30mb!. I've seen the world of computer communications go from private BBS's to services such as AOL and Earthlink to what it is today. That's a huge ramp up in a (redacted) number of decades. It's no longer necessary to have every employee of a company in one building to do business. A phone call two towns over is no longer a long distance call and small businesses are doing business worldwide just as if a customer had walked into their store and arranged for a purchase to be delivered.

We also all now know how bad it can be to pack ourselves together in an office while an illness can travel from any point in the world to any other in less than a couple of days and much faster in many cases. When I graduated from uni (the first time) I had no fear that I'd be exposed to something like Ebola originating in Western Africa. These days, I'm not as confident as flights are resuming to just about everywhere. There was a time and space gap a virus would have to span that protected me. No more. We are back to a situation similar to rat-borne illnesses in days gone by that could travel the Atlantic from Europe to the US on a sailing ship since just one rat could be the culprit. Now, travel by air is accessible to many many more people than ever before. A disease would have to be very fast acting to knock down an infectious person fast enough before they are showing serious symptoms and have been prevented from interacting with hundreds or thousands of people.