Remote Work, Transportation, and SARS-CoV-2

In the past 100 years, the world has experienced three major technological revolutions with respect to human industriousness and communication:

1. Mass availability of automobiles for personal travel.
2. Mass telecommunications for mass one-way messages via television/radio and telephone calls.
3. Mass availability of personal computers.

With these three technologies, one would think that the American dream would be to work from home or near home, to drive to work to solve in-person problems and work communications would be brief, informative, and useful.

Instead, we’re in this bizarre circumstance wherein traveling to a central location (because it came first) is the primary work mindset and telecommunications and computers are used to make employees more aware of their work bureaucracy from home.

Now, working from home has trials and difficulties, but it also allows for helping family, choosing hours, working efficiently without interruption from lazy co-workers, and so-on. This applies to education, most jobs

My hope during the SARS-CoV-2 quarantine situation is that we can make the family the center of American life with work as the intrusion.

This would be good. Old habits die hard, though.

Of course, the issues raised by a viral spread this large are both practical and speculative, for instance, while a smaller world with more local economies would make local quarantining far easier, having megacorporations like Amazon, for all the problems it causes, makes it easier for people to access things like vitamin C, materials they need for their small business when local supplies are unavailable, and so-on. Is there a way, in the future, to have a world that integrates the resources of a global economy while maintaining the local culture and efficiencies of local communities. Like, why is every building in America made of drywall when it mildews easily in humid areas? Mega-economies are efficient at spreading things everywhere regardless of appropriateness.