THE ELECTRONIC COTTAGE
The key question is: When will the cost of installing and operating telecommunications equipment fall below the present cost of commuting? While gasoline and other transport costs (including the costs of mass-transit alternatives to the auto) are soaring everywhere, the price of telecommunications is shrinking spectacularly.* At some point the curves must cross.
But these are not the only forces subtly moving us toward the geographical dispersal of production and, ultimately, the electronic cottage of the future. The Nilles team found that the average American urban commuter uses the gasoline equivalent of 64.6 kilowatts of energy to get back and forth to work each day. (The Los Angeles insurance employees burned 37.4 million kilowatts a year in commuting.) By contrast, it takes far less energy to move information.
A typical computer terminal uses only 100 to 125 watts or less when it is in operation, and a phone line consumes only one watt or less while it is in use. Making certain assumptions about how much communications equipment would be needed, and how long it would operate, Nilles calculated that “the relative energy consumption advantage of telecommuting over commuting (i.e., the ratio of commuting energy consumption to telecommuting consumption) is at least 29:1 when the private automobile is used; 11:1 when normally loaded mass transit is used; and 2:1 for 100 per cent utilized mass transit systems.”
Carried to their conclusion, these calculations showed that in 1975, had even as little as 12 to 14 percent of urban commuting been replaced by telecommuting, the United States would have saved approximately 75 million barrels of gasoline—and would have thereby completely eliminated the need to import any gasoline from abroad. The implications of that one fact for the U.S. balance of payments and for Middle East politics might also have been more than trivial.
As gasoline prices and energy costs in general rise in the decades immediately ahead, both the dollar cost and energy costs of operating “smart” typewriters, telecopiers, audio and video links, and home-size computer consoles will plummet, still further increasing the relative advantage of moving at least some production out of the large central workshops that dominated the Second Wave era.
* Satellites slash the cost of long-distance transmission, bringing it so near the zero mark per signal that engineers now speak of “distance-independent” communications. Computer power has multiplied exponentially and prices have dropped so dramatically that engineers and Investors alike are left gasping. With fiber optics and other new breakthrough technologies hi the wings, it is clear that still further cost reductions lie ahead—per unit of memory, per processing step, and per signal transmitted.
All these mounting pressures toward telecommuting will intensify as intermittent gas shortages, odd-even days, long lines at the fuel pump, and perhaps rationing disrupt and delay normal commuting, further jacking up its cost in both social and economic terms.
To this we can add even more pressures tending in the same direction. Corporate and government employers will discover that shifting work into the home—or into local or neighborhood work centers as a halfway measure—can sharply reduce the huge amounts now spent for real estate. The smaller the central offices and manufacturing facilities become, the smaller the real estate bill, and the smaller the costs of heating, cooling, lighting, policing, and maintaining them. As land, commercial and industrial real estate, and the associated tax load all soar, the hope of reducing and/or externalizing these costs will favor the farming-out of work.
The transfer of work and the reduction of commuting will also reduce pollution and therefore the tab for cleaning it up. The more successful environmentalists become at compelling companies to pay for their own pollution, the more incentive there will be to shift to low-polluting activities, and therefore from large-scale, centralized workplaces to smaller work centers or, better yet, into the home.
Beyond this, as environmentalists and conservation-minded citizens groups battle against the destructive effects of the auto, and oppose road and highway construction, or succeed in banning cars from certain districts, they unwittingly support the transfer of work. The net effect of their efforts is to force up the already high cost and personal inconvenience of transport as against the low cost and convenience of communication.
When environmentalists discover the ecological disparities between these two alternatives, and as the shift of work to the home begins to look like a real option, they will throw their weight behind this important decentralist move and help coax us into the civilization of the Third Wave.
Social factors, too, support the move to the electronic cottage. The shorter the workday becomes, the longer the commuting time in relationship to it. The employee who hates to spend an hour getting to and from the job in order to spend eight hours working may very well refuse to invest the same
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