Inference

Is Working From Home the future?

Inference – The year 2220 will have everyone working from home, may be even working from Mars.

Before the Industrial revolution, let us say before 19th century ,the basic profession and most career choice one could have was being a farmer, carpenter, mason , barber , fisherman, saint, soldier and trader. These were really a broader choice and one had to really fit into these somehow or the other to survive. Most of them involved working near to home but you had to be still out to pursue work.

With advent of Industrial revolution, more jobs were being created by the end of 18th century , the concept of higher production in less time had just begun. A lot of people started getting jobs, a job would be to work what one is asked during a particular day and get paid by the hour. Majority of us today are part of this contract where we go to a work place, work what has been asked of us and end of the day get paid for it, just the terms have changed these days, they pay now bi-weekly, monthly, annually (bonuses).

20th century brings to us fantastic tools called computers and then comes WWW ( World Wide Web), this at first creates more jobs, but people still go to a workplace, because these devices are heavy. Slowly within a decade we see the size of this device shrinking linearly and by 2020, we have devices which can be pushed in our pockets. Innovation in the past 2 decades has grown way faster than generations combined. When innovation grows faster than people, people do not know to adapt to it at the same rate. Smarter folks are creating tools to revolutionize the world, but the world is not able to change its mindset. A study has shown that it takes at least one generation for a collective change of mindset to happen. We slowly see that happening.

The year 2020 simply slapped this archaic world and taught many things to mankind. A sudden event changes people, world changes faster. People are forced for a mindset change. The change we are seeing is coming sooner than usual, most importantly, when today’s workers become industrial leaders after a decade, they will never forget what 2020 taught them. A lot of people have already begun working from home, this is true for most of white collared jobs in the world who are paid to think and not for a laborious task. The blue collared jobs will continue to work in creating very valuable assets and manufacturing the needs of this world, but with robots and mechanizations happening, it is beyond our thinking two centuries from now for the year 2220. May be even them can start working from home, that as of now is only a fiction and a good story for a Sci-Fi movie, but food for thought , there was no internet and computers- 30 years ago, no electric cars- 20 years ago and no popular work from home just 5 years ago.