There’s a common misconception about Covid-19: that the virus has sped us from 2020 to 2030 overnight. However, there's still a kernel of truth to this idea: futurists have long posited that the workplace of tomorrow will be characterised by telecommuting and, indeed, the economy has been forced to embrace this on an unprecedented scale. Right now, a great many companies are practicing “distributed work”, in which everybody is working remotely. But while behaviours have adapted, we are still using the same tools that were available before the pandemic. So, what are the emerging technologies that will transform remote working in years to come?
To Bharat Mediratta, chief technology officer at Dropbox, the quarantine experience has highlighted a huge gap in the market. “What we have right now is a bunch of different productivity and collaboration tools that are stitched together. So I will do my product design in Figma, and then I will submit the code change on GitHub, I will push the product out live on AWS, and then I will communicate with my team using Gmail and Slack and Zoom,” he says. “We have all that technology now, but we don't yet have the ‘digital knowledge worker operating system’ to bring it all together.” That’s a valuable opportunity – and one that Dropbox has firmly in its sights. Last year, it unveiled its new collaboration platform that integrates cloud-based content with many of the apps that Mediratta mentions.
He believes the tool that wins the race to become that go-to “operating system” will be the one that exhibits the most compelling computational smarts. Dropbox is working on an array of ideas, in particular the ability to automate processes. Suppose you need to shepherd a legal document between teams for approval and signature – a digital assistant may be able to handle all that for you. Mediratta says the platform will also be able to use machine learning to offer new insights, since it can analyse data from so many disparate areas of a business. “The workspace could say, ‘Three different divisions in your company have three different conflicting contracts with the same vendor – would you like to optimise that?’ Why, yes, I would!” he says. All of this would free up the user to spend more time being creative.
There’s another more fundamental problem with the current remote-work paradigm, and solving it will likely mean tapping into a nascent technology. Two-dimensional video meetings can’t emulate the inherent virtues of a three-dimensional environment – and that’s where virtual reality may come in. “In the real world we could have a creative session, where we can get up and draw stuff on the board,” says Mediratta. “So I'm pretty much on the verge of just buying everyone a VR headset and when we have certain types of meetings, everyone slaps on the headset and we try to do it in a 3D space.” Even the straightforward ability to make eye contact would vastly improve virtual meeting dynamics. Right now the technology is sub-par but, Mediratta believes, the more people feel this frustration, the more likely it will come of age.
Once it does, it will be possible to undertake even more forms of work remotely. Say you are an engineer who inspects oil rigs. If there’s a robot at the rig beaming video to your VR headset, you can be telepresent from your home office. If you need to repair a part, perhaps you could work on a digital twin of that component, while the robot executes every one of your hand movements in real time hundreds of kilometres away.
As these tools develop, they could prove transformative. Imagine a future where networking step-changes such as 5G grant many more people access to high-speed internet: as remote working becomes more commonplace, spurred by software such as Dropbox’s, the economy would be positioned to reap serious benefits. A Stanford study that monitored staff at China’s largest travel agency across a two-year period showed that the productivity boost from remote working is equivalent to almost one full working day per week. But beyond the business imperatives, there may also be profound social advantages. Analysts have suggested that a workforce open to telecommuting may be more inclusive, employing people from a greater diversity of regions and backgrounds. What’s more, with adults spending more time at home, there may be ameliorative effects for family cohesion and work-life balance.
And ultimately, that’s what really matters – shiny new technologies are never the end in themselves. After we make them, they make us.
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To learn more about the future of distributed work and how to enable your workforce, click here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
