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Commutar
"Never physically commute again".
About us:
We are analyzing and designing and aggregating and developing tele-working ideas, tools and solutions.
Benefits:
Society:
cut fuel/CO2/climatechange, transportation costs, road salt and lake salination, public infrastructure, traffic jams; increase GDP/capita by applying human time/effort to value-adding; use human talent more efficiently
reduce political polarization and radicalization of far right in non-major-urban areas by distributing big city productivity more evenly across a nation
Employee: cut wasted time/life commuting, accidents/injuries/road-death; own home in low cost outlying city and still get to dream job anywhere
Employer: recruit top talent from wider geographical region without paying commute or city-centre-real-estate premium; keep mat-leave employees engaged/transition; capture employee actions for AI training/automation
Issues:
- transmitting motivational and alignment aspects of corporate culture / context / people
- security
- collaboration / coordination hints
Context:
http://reprogrammingmobility.org
- urban mobility in the era of autonomous vehicles
https://www.rethinkx.com/transportation
- shift to TaaS Transport as a Service lowers cost, CO2
- but still hour/day commuting
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171004142706.htm
- VR and telerobotics
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/telecommuting-on-rise-1.4887564
- telecommuting on the rise for real-estate and labor shortage reasons
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-s-digital-workers-1.4889691
- online gig economy doing great
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/telecommuting-productivity-1.4899719
- economics professor's study shows creative work best done at home, dull at office
- suggestion: add 'effort monitor / feedback loop' to show co-workers home person is working hard
Hypotheses for why we still see physical commuting:
A. worker induced/forced/desired commuting
H0: worker needs to feel like they worked / earned their pay, so they appreciate it and save / invest wisely
- (otherwise like lottery winnings - blown/easy-come-esay-go)
- longer commute / longer working day tires them out, makes them feel more like they earned it
- possibly related to Marchetti's constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant
- possibly related to a feeling of 'moral rightiousness'/feeling of relative superiority as motivator, as seen in some religions
H1: humans are pack / herd / tribe / team animals - they want to feel like they belong to a pack
- and physical proximity helps
- provides feeling of security, belonging, purpose
- provides instinctual (pack/tribe/herd) motivation to support what they know logically they should be doing
H2: its about getting away from family / home / house
- a change of context changes state-of-mind, focus, priorities/goals, role and role-behaviour
- ie physical surroundings as cue to mind state / role
-- H: a holodeck room could do the same
- could 'mini-commute' to a nearby telecommuting site for same role-change effect
- could be much different energy states and goal drive: driven at work, relaxed at home
H3: embarrassment / shame about other role
- ashamed of how earn a living
-- want to hide it from familiy, or want to boast/re-interpret/spin to family
- ashamed of familiy/home, want to hide family/home from co-workers/employer
- hiding something from family about work, or hiding something from co-workers about family/home
-- ie complaining as a coping mechanism, need to complain elsewhere in order to survive somewhere
- not ashamed, but normal privacy like washroom privacy
B company/boss induced/forced/desired commuting
H0: security, against
- damaging use of secret information on strategy, technology, personnel, dirt
- publicity embarrassment
via
- 3rd party incidental shoulder surfing, outbound audio
- 3rd party malice - eavesdropping, keyboard intercept for passwords, camera surfing
- worker malice -
a) selling for $
b) defense in case fired > dirt collection, ransomable info
c) future competitor > copying information to non-work computing resources
H1: worker motivation
a) focus
b) monitoring of individual effort/contribution
- especially when deliverables are team effort/shared, or hard to measure
- supplementing or alternative to efficient wages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency_wage
c) convenience / likelihood / ease of coordination / cooperation / info sharing
d) team/pack/tribe shared purpose/goal motivational alignment
H1b: even when not directly talking, often we form decisions and act in a way that we can explain in the context/to the people around us
H2: ease of middle-bossing, bosses feel like they are working/earning their pay just by being in their office eating donuts, if 10 feet away there's a cubical full of workers that report to them
H3: [fear of] cost of digital tracking:
- harder to hire and keep employees if they know everything they do is recorded / recordable / monitored
-- employee exhaustion from continuous 8 hrs real effort, employees burn out, run out of creative ideas
-- vs competitors measure only facetime, and easy to fake busywork when boss looking, for same pay
H4: diversity dividend
- https://www.cigionline.org/person/bessma-momani
-- 'diversity dividend' measured, +ve
- H4a: the more people in a room -even if all vocally silent- the more each one considers more points of view when analyzing and designing
- Corollary 4a: if you're home alone, no diversity dividend
C. task-specific
- dexterous ie food preparation
- whole body ie construction
- customer facing ie walk-in customers at retail
Methods:
0. already plenty of standard IT (information technology) methods for remote working:
- mechanical turks https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
- VPN, VNC, RDP, PPTA, VOIP
- various aftermarket software for remotely collaborating
-- https://www.teamviewer.com/en/
-- etc
Apparently all that's not enough, we still see commuters on the roads and in transit every weekday morning and evening
Here's a few more teleworking methods:
1. TelePresence:using MGOIP (MicroGesture over IP) reduces upload bandwidth allowing continuous operation through working day, shows higher resolution gestures than compressed video, and allows heads to turn in meeting of 3+, so its clear who is talking to who.
https://www.ted.com/talks/julio_gil_future_tech_will_give_you_the_benefits_of_city_life_anywhere
- others thinking about ways to make good use of low density via telepresence
2. Telepresence using HPC-VGOIP - head-pose-corrected video gesture
- like skype except client-side detects similar gesture, and transmits the gesture snippet number instead of compressed video, reducing upload bandwidth for smooth video feed with no dropped frames..
3. TeleRobotics:for dexterous tasks
4. Walking Telerobots for full-body telepresence, for hazardous environment/cleanup, collapsing/burning-building rescue, police SWAT and MIL urban combat.
https://sites.google.com/site/walkingtelerobots/
5. Hyperloop of Things aka HoT to deliver physical packages between worker and worksite when both are in same city