Old ways of working and living will give way to a ‘polycentric’ region.
By Jeff Howe
Federico Gastaldi for the Boston Globe
There’s a saying in technology circles, commonly ascribed to the futurist Roy Amara, that we tend to overestimate the short-term impacts of a new technology but underestimate its long-term consequences. The telephone, commercial air travel, and even the Internet all failed to live up to their initial hype but ultimately transformed our culture and the economy.
Amara’s Law goes a long way toward explaining our current moment. Futurists have been pronouncing the coming ascendancy of “telecommuting,” as it was quaintly called in the age of “Web logs” and CD-ROMs, since the early 1980s. But just because we could didn’t mean we would, and for decades the number of remote workers remained marginal. Human behavior, not technology, ultimately determines the impact of any given innovation. In 2019, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, on