Toffler's tomorrow, Today
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. - SHAKESPEARE
Home telecommuting became more viable as the personal computer market exploded in the late 1970s. Apple's breakthrough Apple II, for example, was released in 1977.
In 1980 futurist Alvin Toffler, author of the 1970 book Future Shock, predicted in his sequel, The Third Wave, that the home would "assume a startling new importance" in the information age, becoming "a central unit in the society of tomorrow – a unit with enhanced rather than diminished economic, medical, educational and social functions."
But with the growth in the internet, management guru Peter Drucker felt confident enough by 1993 to declare commuting to the office obsolete:
It is now infinitely easier, cheaper and faster to do what the 19th century could not do: move information, and with it office work, to where the people are. The tools to do so are already here: the telephone, two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, the modem, and so on.
Vision versus reality
Despite the technology, the growth in working from home has been slow. A large survey of Anglo countries by IBM in 2014 found just 9% of employees teleworked at least some of the time, with about half of those doing it full-time or most of the time. Data from Australia and U.S. suggest the proportion was still less than 20% at the end of 2019.
in 1980 Alvin Toffler wrote in this book The Third Wave about 'electronic cottages' from which prosumers will shape local and global markets: 'one change is so potentially revolutionary, and so alien to our experience [is] the shift of work out of the office and factory and back into the home ... many people may soon be working at home anyway in the electronic cottages of tomorrow ... many of the same electronic devices we will use in the home to do work for pay will also make it possible to produce goods or services for our own use.
In this system the prosumer, who dominated in First Wave societies, is brought back into the center of economic action— but on a Third Wave, high- technology basis.
