Comment by chaosmachine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaosmachine | Hacker News Reader

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These are some really prescient predictions...

- The home will double as a place of employment, with men and women conducting much of their work at the computer terminal. This will affect both the architecture and location of the home. It will also blur the distinction between places of residence and places of business, with uncertain effects on zoning, travel patterns and neighborhoods.

(This basically describes my life ;)

- Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly, ordering exactly what they need for "production on demand."

(Kickstarter is a nice example.)

- There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.

(You're participating in one such peer group right now...)

- A new profession of information "brokers" and "managers" will emerge, serving as "gatekeepers," monitoring politicians and corporations and selectively releasing information to interested parties.

(Bloggers, obviously, but more interestingly, Wikileaks, Lulzsec, Anonymous...)

The overlapping of home and workplace appears to have been the primary pattern of human habitation since before the bronze age. It is the recent pattern of home and workplace segregation which has been facilitated by 20th century transportation technology which is the radical exception.

I would argue that it was industrialisation, not transport, that led to home/workplace segregation. Large mills, running on water or steam power, could not exist on a small scale or too near to residences.

Just as much, because large mills give the ability to monitor your workers. Getting people to clock on 8 hours per day (or, before the socialists changed it, 14+ hours per day) gives you much more ability to extract labour from them.

I disagree with you on all of these, actually.

-The home does double as a place of employment, but this has had no discernible effect on the architecture and location of the home, or led to significant changes in zoning or travel patterns.

-Home-based shopping has indeed taken off, but manufacturing has not switched to a production-on-demand model (and Kickstarter has nothing to do with this whatsoever-- that's about seed funding.)

-Friends, peer groups and alliances are indeed determined electronically, but this has not (yet) led to "classes of people" akin to social class.

-Information brokers do serve as gatekeepers, but this has not become professionalized; bloggers (and groups like Wikileaks, Lulzsec, etc.) are amateurs, and have not developed professional standards or codes of ethics, etc.

In other words, Yogi Berra was right: prediction is hard, especially about the future.

Its hard for the fish to recognize the water. Seeing the whole transformation happen (having been alive in 1982) this has largeley happened.

Houses are built with home-office space, with network wiring throughout, with attention to where light will interfere with screens. TV/monitors in every room, phone wiring all but obsolete.

SO houses are not a totally different shape or anything, but they are different. And who would buy an old house with a parlor, a sleeping porch and summer kitchen?

Amazon started with a drop-ship model where books were ordered/printed on demand. Their volume outgrew this. So its been transformed twice.

And you don't think young people divide the world into 'those who text/twitter/facebook' and 'old people'? Maybe you don't select friends based on class, but its happening anyway.

I think bloggers are maturing right now. Traditional media is in decline yet we have hardly any way to select quality blog sources, there are few 'big names' that last long enough to become entrenched in society like WSJ or the Times.

I'm astonished by the article for an entirely different reason: how was it so easy to predict all this so well?

When my wife and I are looking for homes, we definitely take the needs of our two home offices into consideration. We don't care about formal living and dining room spaces.

A company like Dell has very tight supply lines made possible by online orders. They couldn't do what they do efficiently if they had to predict demand and stuff a retail sales channel with product six months to a year in advance. That's how you did it in 1982.

As far as manufacturing is concerned, print-on-demand is a good example of one sector that has gone into the production-on-demand direction. Springer has almost entirely to print-on-demand, for example.

But yeah, I'm with you that the extent of future changes is almost always either over- or underestimated.

I work for Lightning Source, a POD provider, and I can tell you that the "production-on-demand" model is working out pretty fine and dandy :-)

That's a bit of an overstatement where Springer is concerned. Right now, they have 15,000 titles from the past 5 years available as print-on-demand, which is impressive enough, but they publish 6,500 titles per year, and have been for decades-- so they are still a long way from having even half of their titles available in that form. Not exactly "almost entirely".

You're right about architecture and location of homes.

But:

* there's a discernable trend in my social circles to locate well away from cities (and the first world) - but I can't find good statistics to back this up as more than just anecdote

* companies such as IBM claimed that due to the expansion of teleworking, they're able to save USD700m per year (but I keep finding secondary sources for this claim, and anyway they probably sell telecommuting solutions, so decreasing the trustworthiness of the numbers)

* growth in creatives filling my local cafe as their office makes it almost impossible to get a table to drink an espresso and have a slice of cake - again hopelessly anecdotal

It's actually maddening that there don't appear to be any good statistics (or even academic papers with theoretical models) on this.

Anyone with any national or urban statistics that correlate things like economic growth, percentage days worked from home, average growth in peak commute time traffic-kilometers in urban and suburban traffic systems versus actual? Extra points for urban transit ridership growth or shrinkage during peak commute time.

To all of those you could reply "not yet, but we've come a long way".

I think we're still in the early stages of the "virtualisation" of the world, and those predictions will work out eventually.

I'd like to take issue with: "manufacturing has not switched to a production-on-demand model"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_(business)

There's quite a difference between JIT and producing after the customer has placed an order (which is what the article proposed.)

Apple do that too when you order online.

Think about this for a moment. You're saying that Apple has no iPods in inventory, and when I order one online, they manufacture it for me? Really?

Nope. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying if you order a custom machine from Apple they build it to order. I have followed this process online from manufacture to delivery.

On a more general note…

Saying X does Y does not imply X only does Y.

However saying X was wrong in their prediction of Y doing Z can be disproven by one present example of Y doing Z.

We can argue how much the internet has been a cause of some companies adopting build-on-demand or the relative slow uptake of build-on-demand as a strategy (and whether the adoption of China as the de-facto mass-manufacturer for all modern goods and the subsequent need to bulk order in advance is a major factor in its uptake) .

However we cannot argue about whether some businesses do it. This is proven.

Agreed. Humans are notoriously bad at crystal ball gazing as Gartner proves every year about smart phones.

The "uncertain effects on zoning" seem to be just a way to money-grab around here. I had to pay my township for a zoning permit to have a home office... that is, a fee just to have a computer used for business inside a residence.

Did you need this permit for something specific, like your insurance or for having your home address as your business address?

The township knows I work from home because the address for my business license is my home. A zoning permit is required for any home occupation, even if it involves no business use of the home beyond having a computer there. That's on top of the annual business privilege fee and gross receipts tax. Being self-employed means a lot of hands in your pocket around here...

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