According to a recent survey about 40% of people in Prague plan to work-from-home once the current Covid-19 restrictions are lifted [see photo]. As someone who has spent great portions of his life in home-based work environments I am not sure that many workers will survive and thrive even in their ideal home office.
When you work at home the nature of what you do will be predominantly mental not physical. Can you stack shelves in your local Supermarket from your bedroom? Well not yet. But remote access to, and control of, the shelves in your local store through robotics is surely coming. Once this development gains momentum AI-bots will become a core element of production and delivery of goods within the new work-from-home world. At this point the home-based worker is most likely to be a scheduler, comptroller, project manager, etc. These new-age workers will do the heavy-mental lifting in an AI automated world. Of course there will also be the creatives who ply their trade, or express their mental independence, on canvas, screens, paper, etc. A lot of these creatives are natural loners - people who can survive and thrive based on their own thoughts - and need little work space to find success.
The new workplace remains a fluid concept at present. However the notion of being "at work" is clearly being redefined by the nature of the activity. The focus for defining work shifts from the physical to the mental. The place of work shifts from the downtown office to the computer screen in a basement in the suburbs or a desk in the corner of a small flat in the centre of Prague, Sydney, London, Hong Kong, New York, etc. The good news here is that many people will get rich because they will decide what is fashionable for a home-work station. Of course most of these folks will work in local offices not at home. These folks will implement new ways of working that utilises the new 5G infrastructure to link local workers in ways that will most likely look more like 19th guilds than C20th union led workplaces.
For me the new challenge for those who are about to redefine "work" is the relationship between AI and humans. Who is the boss - the bot or the human? Where does that boss sit within a process that is more and more reliant upon data networks? What new term will emerge to describe "work" in C21st?
Richard.
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