I find it interesting that we spend so much time discussing the potential of artificial intelligence to change business, education, and medical care in America, which is already happening apace, but we seem to avoid talking about a technological change that has already far more profoundly and immediately transformed our nation—the rise of remote work and workers. When the history of this period of our country’s history is written decades from now, it will be impossible to ignore the social, cultural, and economic earthquake caused by tens of millions of average Americans simply sitting at home in their sweats and slippers with a computer and a cup of coffee.
Nothing about the fabric of American life will ever be the same again because work and a physical location have been decoupled for the many millions of American workers not engaged in manual labor. Farmers and their fields, for example, still need to be in close proximity, but a wide variety of information, customer service, professional, and tech workers are now untethered from traditional offices and work hours.
This is a boon for individuals, but it has been a knife to the heart of our nation’s urban centers, which are crumbling before our very eyes.
The root cause of the precipitous declines of our troubled American cities over the past few years is simple: many, many fewer Americans are commuting into them since the end of the pandemic lockdowns and shutdowns.
Office vacancy rates have skyrocketed in major cities nationwide, and the secondary economic effects on restaurants, retailers, entertainment venues, the revenues of public transportation systems, and municipal tax collections have blown a gigantic fiscal hole in the budgets of cities ranging from New York to San Francisco. These problems have been compounded by misguided law enforcement policies that have caused the rates of all manner of urban crimes to explode, which has discouraged tourism and depressed hotel occupancies, which has further exacerbated the rapidly unfolding disaster facing businesses that desperately need bodies walking in their doors to survive.
Obviously, cities facing the remote worker crisis cannot simply shrink their borders to accommodate this new reality, and the physical infrastructure of our nation’s urban environments is a sunk cost that will continue to require expensive maintenance regardless of the diminishing need for its existence as many fewer people are using urban roads, tunnels, bridges, water and sewer systems, electrical grids, and cavernous commercial real estate.
The inevitable downward pressures on city budgets are going to lead to cuts in vital municipal workers such as police, firefighters, public health and sanitation workers, and social service employees, which could easily lead to a self-reinforcing doom loop as cities become grittier, less welcoming, and more dangerous for commuters, tourists, and their remaining residents. Perhaps, as some cities are desperately hoping, their vital cores can be revitalized by turning vacant office space into housing, but this seems a last long shot bet in the face of titanic changes they are ill-equipped to weather.
The fact of the matter is remote work might be rapidly erasing the very reason for the continued existence of many formerly vibrant American cities. If much commerce can thrive, many college students can be educated, and a significant portion of routine medical care can be delivered without anyone having to step foot in the city where these services ostensibly originate, it is difficult to see why many downtowns even need to exist—no matter how they might be reconfigured.
Workers who are no longer tethered to an office, tech-savvy students who have no need of a physical classroom on a campus, and patients who can meet with their doctors on a remote platform unless an office visit is absolutely necessary are driving a revolution that is transforming every aspect of our daily lives. As we grow more accustomed to interactions conducted on our phones, tablets, and laptops, the fabric of our lives—the connections that once defined our lives—will be stretched to the breaking point before snapping altogether.
Unanswered questions about the psychological and emotional impacts of our accelerating disconnection from actual interactions with human beings will become more pressing in the years ahead as we continue to trade the conveniences of lives lived remotely for the loneliness that must inevitably follow.
We already know that children and adolescents cut off from their peers by the lockdowns and shutdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic response suffered grave—and perhaps irreparable—psychological damage. Rates of depression and anxiety among our young are way up, suicidal actions and ideation are at epidemic levels, and Math and Reading scores plummeted because the government imprisoned young people in their homes. Can we still possibly believe that isolation, even that which we deem desirable because we can work in the comfort of our own homes, is without real and potentially devastating consequences for our emotional and psychological health?
Even the most comfortable and seemingly benign solitary confinement can drive us mad in the long run.
What do we expect the future has in store for adult workers eating the Thai food delivered to their doors while they peer at a computer screen for decades on end? Can text messages and Zoom chats readily substitute for the physical presence of another living, breathing human being? Will we, over time, be rendered incapable of making the interpersonal connections necessary for lives that are truly fulfilling—rather than just marking the days before we start swiping through an online dating site looking for love?
Whether our increasingly virtual personal lives can suffice will, of course, become clearer with the passage of time. However, what is already abundantly obvious is that our economic, cultural, and social lives are being transformed by remote work, remote education, and remote medicine.
The cascading effects of lives that are increasingly and unremittingly housebound sound much like the plot of a bad science fiction movie, and we need to also reckon with the heretofore unrecognized political fallout of training citizens to focus inward and live within extraordinarily circumscribed limits. Will our empathy for others atrophy? Will we become supremely self-indulgent and self-involved? Will we become adverse to personal contacts and create for ourselves lives that are lonelier and more devoid of the love and friendships that make our lives worth living—a nation of spectators watching our lives pass by?
The role that artificial intelligence will play in our futures is, of course, a wild card. It could turn out that any job that can be done remotely can be done just as well by a few lines of software code or a bot. After all, much of the stock trading on Wall Street is already one computer playing games with another computer (humans are superfluous), and Harvard University is now using bots as Teaching Assistants in their computer science courses.
If this is our future, a world run by the technology that used to be our servants, the economic, social, and psychological consequences are impossible to predict. All we can know for certain at this point is that the revolution wrought by remote work and remote workers has changed our here and now—immutably, irreversibly, and irretrievably.