Once something complicated and new becomes more of a known quantity, then it gets distilled into an icon planners use in a next iteration. For example, a fulfillment center. Slide the icon onto a grid, with the accompanying fleets of delivery vehicles.
Catalyzed by the global pandemic, many have migrated to a new lifestyle involving working from home and getting most supplies delivered. In complementary fashion, many have migrated to delivering for a living. A given individual may go back and forth between staying home a lot, versus keeping the products and people moving.
Remote work tends to be cloud based, where the cloud consists of office work, now virtualized. Replacing the current workforce (an ongoing challenge) means grooming a next generation of people comfortable using cloud services to create infrastructure.
It’s not like construction jobs are going away. What we build is changing though. Designing for remote workers means integrating work / study with sleeping and eating. How is this done? Tech companies generally have a cafeteria and recreation spaces, even gyms, but because of zoning, they’re not also residential. The mixed use building is moving into the foreground, where instead of driving your car to work, you take an elevator. Or you simply stay put.
A lot of work requires special facilities, such as factories, body maintenance shops (clothes, nails and hair, dentistry, tanning and massage, gyms, general healthcare). When many companies co-locate, you have the makings of a village or a city. This is what we see today.
We should not neglect the institutions involved in metaphysical disciplines, including the ideological ones that require the killing of other humans. Humans seem to have mostly resigned themselves to the fact that mass murder is necessary, to keep their living standards high. A few countering ideologies promote the idea that we’re capable, as a species, of largely ending our dysfunctional and pathological ways.
These countering ideologies are sometimes stereotyped as Luddite and/or back to the land, as if the best way to end the butchering of humans by other humans was to “opt out” of a mainstream lifestyle. However, some schools of thought embrace combinations of technology and metaphysics as potentially capable and effective enough to obviate the need for WMDs. They emphasize reshaping, more than violently disrupting, a pre-existing set of lifestyles.
When I talk about the metaphysical disciplines, what do I mean? Religions? Cults? Philosophies? I mean all of the above. Humans are not finished creating these. “The best religions are yet to come” might sound sacrilegious, but on the other hand, it might sound like a promise from God, prompting a kind of hallelujah response. Amen.
