Regular readers know that I consider myself somewhat of an amateur futurist, no matter how lousy I actually am at it, and that I enjoy coming up with all kinds of new theories about this or that, concentrating more on innovation (new ways of using existing stuff) than invention (coming up with new stuff). I've been thinking again recently, in fact, about an idea I first came up with a couple of years ago, that I was originally going to write up for this futurist website I'm a fan of, but then became unsure of just how original an idea it is; after all, like most ideas based on innovation rather than invention, it is in fact not much more than an examination of current realities about life taken just a step or two past their current implementations. Am I losing you? Here, let me just get into the idea itself...

I call it the "Distributed Life," and was first inspired by a new innovation in technology that's become quite popular in the last half-decade, called "distributed computing." Basically, it's a way for an organization to gather up the kind of computer power that usually only comes from a highly expensive "supercomputer," but for a fraction of the cost, namely by convincing thousands of volunteers to run a special piece of software on their home computers when they're not using them themselves. After all, modern home computers have gotten powerful enough to be called legitimate micro-supercomputers on their own; network a thousand of them together in an intelligent way, and they really do become as powerful computation-wise as an average Cray owned by a university or special-effects company. This then allows a group like NASA's Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program to continue the complex work of analyzing trillions of bits of random radio data, even in an age when such programs' budgets are being slashed more and more with each year, precisely through getting fellow geeks and their powerful home computers directly involved. In effect it's using the latest advances in online technology to envision a "grid" of power and connections that already exists around us at all times, and to re-imagine that grid in a new way that an organization like NASA can take advantage of.

In my usual nerdy way, then, this got me to thinking of another invisible grid that's in all our lives, which is the grid by which our day-to-day lives are lived out, with certain "zones" in which certain general things happen, and specific periods within those zones for doing more specific things. For example, it's been a reality for millennia that most people require eight hours of sleep a day; that's an entire third of a 24-hour grid that can be immediately inked out, in that it's impossible to do anything else while sleeping besides sleep. If you're an average corporate employee, then, you might have an eight-hour block of this grid set aside for "work," although that's not really the case when you stop and think about it; that the zone we commonly refer to as "work" actually includes the time to get to that place of work and back, the hour in the middle of the day for lunch, the time spent showering each morning and the time spent winding down when getting home. In reality, then, at least for most corporate employees in the Western world, the "work" part of their daily grid lasts more like twelve hours a day than eight. Combined with the time needed for sleeping, then, this leaves most middle-class Westerners with roughly four or five hours a day for so-called "pleasure," which in our modern world comprises everything from family time to sex, entertainment, intellectual pursuits, social obligations and more. Then on most weekends, corporate employees are suddenly given that sixteen-hour two-day work block of their grid to devote to personal activities instead; and this is why, of course, most pleasure activities as well as family ones occur on the weekends.

But as almost all corporate employees these days know, not even the above scenario is quite true anymore; that a profound rise in technology has created a situation where workers can now be at the 24/7 beck and call of their corporate masters. And this being the beginning of such an age, of course, much like the beginning of the Industrial Age it has mostly been the corporations themselves gaining from such a thing, and workers mostly getting the shaft; the situation as of the writing of this essay, for example (autumn 2007), is that most offices require their employees to still physically be there eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, but then also be at the 24-hour beck and call of cellphones, pagers, email, IM and the like, whenever and wherever Management just happens to want them. But see, this situation is going to change, just like the initially abhorrent Industrial Age eventually gave way to the minimum wage, weekends off, the 40-hour work week, organized labor, environmental laws, indoor plumbing, and a whole lot more. Eventually, although admittedly maybe not soon, the balance of this new technological reality is going to swing towards the benefit of workers as well; that in return for your "work day" now stretching towards 24 hours, you will no longer be required to physically be an office for eight of those hours each day.

I mean, we've been moving towards this reality for decades now; telecommuting jobs have been common since the '70s, and at the millennium there are more people than ever who are office workers half of the week, freelancers and other independent operators the other half. Offices still mostly get away with eight forced hours on-site each day simply because they can; but more and more, smart cutting-edge companies will start offering alternatives, like only having to come to the office 20 hours a week, which all other companies will eventually have to adopt themselves or risk not attracting any decent employees. Yes, this might still take a long time from now to become the mainstream norm -- as long as 30 or 40 years, in fact, although maybe the world will surprise me and transition within a decade; the fact, though, is that we as Western Society are marching towards this new reality little by little on a daily basis right now, just as surely as the pope is Polish...er, German, German.

At the same time, then, the nature of traditional education is starting to slowly change as well, although admittedly even more incrementally than the business world is, or in other words at a glacial pace; this is the institution, after all, that even in 2007 is still determining its calendar based on the idea that their students need the summers off to work on their family's farm. When you strip away all the ritualism of academia, though, all the "we do it this way because we've always done it this way" dogma, you'll see that rising technology is profoundly changing the way that education even works, not to mention the list of useful things students need to know by the time their basic education is over. For example, although computers still can't replace the benefits of human teachers, they have certainly gotten powerful enough to replace some of the duties of human teachers, especially mundane ones; combined with the web, virtual realities, distance learning and more, it's also a powerful enough environment to serve as an individualized tutor for each student, at the times they wish to delve into independent study of an advanced topic. Like I said, human teachers are still very important to education in this day and age, and always will be; in fact, I see this rise in technology as aiding this process, in that it leaves the teachers more free to devote individual time to each student, for the real-time one-on-one tutoring that is precisely the best thing about having a human teacher in the first place.

In both of these situations, then, not only in education but at corporate offices, what I'm really talking about is no less than an entirely new breakup of this daily life grid, one that's been more or less around in an unchanged form since the beginning of the Industrial Age itself, in the early 1800s here in America for example. And this leads to what I call the Distributed Life, an entirely new way of thinking about what we could be doing with our time; that much like the distributed computing described earlier, what if we were to spend part of our time each day in a distributed real-life environment, one that combines personal time with work time with school time with family time? Instead of our daily life grid including an eight-hour uninterrupted chunk of time at an office or school, why not devote just four hours a day to them instead, spending the other four hours of that chunk at home, doing our work and school activities via technology?

My theory is this -- that if you were to do such a thing for both parents and kids, in both a working and educational setting, so that the time at home was the same for everyone involved, it would create a situation much greater and more wonderful than simply working or going to school only half-days. That if you were to use technology to your advantage, change the very institutions which would need to work cooperatively with you to create such a situation, you could literally have a new part of your daily grid that millions cry out for these days -- where you are spending a profound amount of quality "family time" together each day, while still being as proficient or more so at your day job as you were before, while at the same time your kids getting an insanely better education than the current Industrial-Age model could ever hope to bestow. It's not just a more leisure-filled life, but where that leisure time is filled with more important and fulfilling activities than our current situations; where people are more relaxed and in better moods than our current times, able to concentrate more and able to add more of the arts and culture and intellectualism to their lives, where "family time" means not just a shared dinner around a formica table but an actual chunk of your professional life, an actual chunk of your kids' education.

Now like I said, the vision I have in my head is not just a matter of slapping a bandage on the current systems of Western society, but an entire redefining of those systems themselves; that's a big change in both technology and attitude you're talking about, that would need to happen at both schools and offices for such a Distributed Life to be a mainstream reality. For example, for such a new daily grid to work, parents would have to start looking at their children's education as a partnership between themselves and the school district's teachers; that half of that child's oversight and guidance would now come from the school system, the other half needing to come from the parents at home through distributed technology. What this in effect means, then, is an entirely different approach as to how we educate children in the first place; a splitting of what we find important, that is, into a half that's best done with a teacher and a half best done through independent learning. Individualized humanities electives, for example, based on that child's individual interests, would be best done during the four hours each day now spent at home, things like a foreign language or history or literature or whatnot; things that we find important to standardize, like minimum math levels, would be best done at school, where teachers can keep a close eye on each student's progress.

In effect what it does is create a situation where every parent gets to homeschool their child part-time, while creating a work environment that encourages this homeschooling instead of making it a daunting challenge. But at the same time, though, it still preserves all the things that are best about a central location for group educational activities; things like sports, band, a theatre program, a shop program, an A/V department, field trips and more. And meanwhile, this is an extra four hours a day as well for adults to claim a little more as their own; where they're still doing office work, sure, but at least are not chained to a desk every minute of those four hours, in a much more comfortable home environment and while spending part of that time with their kids as well. As I think most office workers will tell you, it's not the actual requirements of their jobs that drive them the craziest, but more the insane amount of time wasted each day within a traditional office environment; that of a typical eight hours being forced to be at an office, maybe only three to four hours of actual work gets done, leaving half a day that could be so better spent by each individual, if only their xenophobic bosses weren't terrified by the idea of not hovering over their employees' shoulders every minute of the freaking day.

Most companies aren't ready to do this yet; most are still stuck in the 200-year-old mindset of the Industrial Age, the one that says that employees are shiftless lazy uneducated animals, ones that will stop being productive the exact moment you physically take your eye off them. In the Information Age this simply isn't true; success in our age requires much more individual decision-making, entrepreneurialism and initiative from the start, meaning that you naturally fall behind through inaction whether or not a boss is watching you. It self-motivates a lot more middle-class workers than ever happened in the "humans as machines" days of the Industrial Age; we now live in an age where workers actually do better when given significant amounts of time to work at their own pace, unsupervised in a comfortable environment. Like I said, this change in attitude will eventually happen on a society-wide basis; it's already happening in the high-tech world, after all, with an increasing amount of employees in that industry already having a work situation much like the one described today. And with such things as homeschooling and Montessori schools becoming more and more the norm, especially among the upper-middle-class bracket that most high-tech workers find themselves in, it creates a situation where more and more people actually can implement a Distributed Lifestyle exactly like the one I just detailed. And this, like I said, is why I ultimately hesitated about writing this up for that futurist website I'm a fan of; that ultimately I'm not really describing a brand-new situation, but merely arguing that this cutting-edge reality is bound to become more and more of our societal norm with every passing year.

Still, though, quite an interesting concept to bandy about, at least in my opinion; an interesting way to think about what daily life might be like for the average Western citizen sooner than we think, of what kinds of new benefits can come to our lives because of the Information Age. As with the onset of any great new age in human development, there are not only detriments to the changes in society going on these days but exciting new opportunities around the corner; that for many of us, we might soon start seeing a life that makes us profoundly happier more quickly than we thought possible. If nothing else, it's at least something fascinating to spend some time contemplating, and thinking about how could be best implemented in your own life.