Life during and after an outbreak: Should remote living take off?
I am one of the privileged few who can work from home. I have been doing so since January. This was slightly before Coronavirus turned into a pandemic. I won’t deny that I am loving the opportunity but hating the reasons why this is becoming the norm. In terms of work-life balance, I couldn’t be in a better situation. I still get up early, do some jogging in the park nearby, get some household chores done and have breakfast with my family before getting ready and logging in at 9:00 am. At around 5:30 pm, I can log-off after a day that has been far more productive than any other day in the office. Then I can forget about work. My mind is in peace knowing that everything that needs to be done for the day has been done, and everything that needs to be done for the next is already planned. I even have time for my hobbies and joined a Solo Jazz and Charleston dance classes one evening a week. I highly recommend it. Except that it has now been cancelled until further notice. Yes, we can try to carry on by watching online videos. But I will miss the self-conscious giggles we share when getting our steps wrong. I will miss cheating the moves by relying on colleagues with better rhythm, timing and coordination than me.
For the first time in many years, I can switch to the TV in the evening and pay attention to the news or a film all the way through. I am not constantly exhausted from the continuous noise from the office or commuting. I still feel as fresh as in the morning. I just wish we were living through a period when watching the News wasn’t so depressing. Since 2016, the first thing I do when I wake up is to reach out to my mobile and say: “Let’s check if the world is still there”. But at every time I did this, I was hoping that things would start getting better and not worse. That was until Coronavirus moved from one host animal to another.
There is a big difference from having the privilege of working from home to being forced to do so. It is easy to glee at the opportunities brought by the imposed remote working while forgetting that there are large sections of the society without this option. We are just dominoes standing up in a long line. If one of us fall, we will all fall. Soon there might be more of us without a home to work from. It is in this way that any advice on how to work better from our little castles sounds contemptuous and tone-deaf.
It is not just about those who can’t work from home. In the UK, there are children whose main meal of the day, or even the only meal, is the school dinner. They also rely on libraries for computers and an internet connection. Those libraries are now closed or planning to do so very soon. Some households might have only one computer, if at all. They might lack appropriate space for each child to focus on remote studying, while parents might need to use the only computer available for work. Even if all children in the world had everything they need for home-schooling, I strongly believe, as a parent, that this wouldn’t be the best option for everyone. We are, after all, social animals.
As a technologist, I believe that it would be very short-sighted to bet on a future where life can be lived remotely. Why not go the full hog and invest heavily on a Virtual Reality office? Can you imagine creating your smartly presented avatar to interact with the avatar of your colleagues, in a virtual reality open plan office, while in the real world you would be in your jogging pants lounging in a garden chair? But hey, why not going even further and create a virtual reality theatre, football stadium, church, grocery store, school, night club, gym, pub, botanic garden, promenade, museum and fill them all with avatars and holograms of ourselves?
Wait! Why should we stop there? Why not create a virtual reality home? In the real world, we could just be individually isolated in a hermetically sealed space capsule, maintained by feeding tubes, while our minds are immersed in a virtual world that is so highly customizable, that unknown to everyone, it becomes almost identically the same. All risk associated with pandemics would be eliminated. There wouldn’t be the need for any holiday, sick pay or any time off. Everyone would be at 100% capacity! Can you imagine the amount of space and trouble that would be saved?
I can even hear some cheers from those who are mysteriously confident that they would be the only humans left with real life. A life that would, by the way, be sustained by a population of blissfully unaware vegetables with some brain activity. We could even go beyond this Matrix-inspired World and ensure that machines learn each individual’s thought processes and reactions. Then when each one of us dies, AI can take over our avatars or holograms and carry on as if we were still alive. Machines would become us, while 99% of humanity vanishes. Wouldn’t that be great for the Environment?
Actually, no! Machines wouldn’t need clean air, clean water and food. Machines wouldn’t care about wild weather creating havoc. They would neither need ecological equilibrium between species to ensure that there would always be enough food, clean air and water, while pandemics would be easy to control or impenetrable to the hermetically sealed capsules. They would care about metals and minerals that need to be mined in highly polluting ways. They would care about having a massive amount of electricity to exist, no matter how this electricity would be produced. For those mysteriously confident people, who believe they would be the surviving 1%, forget about any fantasies related to walks in the Garden of Eden.
In as much as I enjoy the benefits of working remotely, it would be very short-sighted to focus on technology that assumes that remote interaction could be the solution for everything. It is not. We are, after all, humans. We are made of organic matter. We still need real air circulating into our lungs.
It is worth repeating as many times as necessary: We are social animals. We need to be able to share mealtimes, hold hands, give cuddles or a pat in the back. We need to be able to do all this in 3D while sharing the same air molecules. Pixelated life is not the same as real life. No matter, how sharp it might be. Technology needs to be used to help us to remain as humans.
The real technological solution we need right now is to enable the development of a vaccine while making prevention and cure more efficient. AI is already been used to identify patterns and collect vital data to help with medical research. It is already helping with tracking infectious diseases and detecting outbreaks. But AI is only as good as the data that can be gathered. The availability of tests for everyone and in every single country, regardless of any of their symptoms, is crucial to a better understanding of the spread of the disease, the magnitude of the problem, the best course of treatment and the best control plan.
Communication is another important area during such a crisis. More than ever, it is clear that there is a need to improve the way information is disseminated to the public. Better algorithms are necessary to identify and curb the spread of damaging information by bad actors while protecting everyone’s privacy. Social Media companies and Traditional Media own that responsibility. They also need to be able to help expert guidance cutting through the anxious noise created by so many platforms.
Life, in general, will be very different after Covid-19. There is no point in acting selfishly. We are all part of a chain and soon or later everyone will be affected, in a way or another. We need to start thinking quickly on what else we can do, whatever small, to help with going back to life as we know it.
Looking at my twitter feed today, I saw someone with an idea to support the Catering, Hospitality, Entertainment and Retail Sectors. He suggested buying gift vouchers that could be used once this crisis is over. If you are, somehow, profiting from all this (someone always does), consider putting your surplus back into your community. If you have stockpiled, make sure to share your excess with someone who is running out of supplies.
If you can be on call, share your contact details with your neighbours by dropping a note in their letterboxes. Invite them to contact you if they need anything. While working from home, open the curtains and ensure that you are visible to any neighbours who are passing by. Wave at them and smile. If you can go out for whatever reason, make sure to wave and smile at your neighbours who are visible from their windows. It is a simple gesture of friendliness that can make a difference to the day of those feeling down. It is comforting to know that they are noticed and can call for help if they need. We should all be doing that all the time anyway, with or without virus. Finally, there is no better time to understand and practice that old slogan in the best possible way: “Keep Calm and Carry On”.
