{tech}.Ben Buckman.net

The Boston Public Library asks, "Imagine the BPL in 10 years and it’s the best possible public library - what does that mean to you?"

Commenter Diane K. Danielson imagines the library as a place to rent work space by the day:

By 2012 it’s predicted that more of the population will work from home than in an office, I envision more “rentable” workspaces where you could rent for $5-10/day a workspace with internet access, etc. (or pay a monthly pass).

I find that idea very interesting. I've never seen $5/day workspace, except university cafes ($5 worth of coffee and bagels), but the idea can be taken a lot further than public libraries.

I was musing to colleagues today that in a few years, when we have fully immersive 3D virtual reality interfaces, working from home will have a whole new meaning - you'll have a virtual cubicle (or seaside deck, as one prefers), and colleagues will be walking and talking with you in real time just like an office - sitting at a console at home, or in Panera Bread, or the library. And then companies won't need to rent office space anymore - they'll subscribe to a virtual reality cloud software service instead - and the market for commercial workspace real estate will shrivel up, i.e. crash.

Retail stores will become virtual as well; Radio Shack will have all the size, sights, and sounds of the real deal, but exist only as electrons. (Our two-dimensional "e-commerce" that has flipped retail upside down will look like child's play then.) There will be no point in local branches anymore; one or a dozen virtual versions of each chain will be available anywhere at any time. Obviously that doesn't bode well for employment, so how an economy of this sort can possibly work, I don't know.

Food will still need physical space - you can't buy a cheeseburger in a totally virtual McDonalds. And some stores will be able to offer some edge that invites and requires a physical experience. But most won't need or be able to do that.

Only residential real estate will be vital forever - we'll still need a structure to sleep in - though possibly a much smaller one, augmented by virtual expansion. And to support all this virtual commerce, distribution of goods will be more critical than ever: imagine whole highways, air routes, underground tunnels, etc built solely to move things to distribution nodes.

What happens to "local" in this future? The demise of the mom-and-pop store is an old story, accelerated in this recession, but this would be a whole new level. It could be in reverse, however: in a virtual world, location is irrelevant, so every store is on 5th Avenue and a bad store on 5th Avenue might as well be underground. Imagine if eBay were a physical mall. Technology flattens the terrain in both senses of the word. But physical local - your street, your town, your community - could become even less meaningful. If the person in a chat room today has a realistic virtual presence next to you tomorrow, why talk to your neighbor? And what keeps us from becoming the sedentary blobs like the people in Wall-E?