In practice, are the last 8 hours of a workweek as productive as the first 8 hours? Would employers actually be losing 20% of a worker's productivity in many cases? Or would it be more like 10%? Maybe even less, if productivity improves on the four working days?
Hard to generalize of course, but my gut feeling (based on my company’s experiment for 13 weeks) is that it’s less than 10%. Potentially increasing longer-term productivity. Emphasis on long-term because it might seem like a drop in the short term. Longer term job satisfaction and general well being can increase, focus and just being able to recharge more effectively. Yes, completely anecdotal. FWIW My company since decided to switch to 4-days all year in 2021.
For myself, I find I'm more productive in the last half of the week. But my employer (and team) tend to front-load the week with meetings, so by Wednesday my schedule is clear enough to be heads-down and get stuff done.
I guess the impact is quite small since deadlocks (meetings, approvals, other peoples' code etc) you need to wait out is much of the work hours anyway.
That's why one place I really want a driving assist is automatically backing out of spaces in parking lots. Visibility is terrible for the driver. You need to be paying close attention in multiple directions at once, you often don't have visibility at all when you need to start moving (like a larger vehicle parked next to you), and both pedestrians and other vehicles can appear out of nowhere, often moving in unexpected directions. It feels very unsafe.
Computer vision could be making those go-stop decisions for you, much more effectively than human drivers.
Heck, imagine a "smart" parking lot that tracks its available spaces and communicates with your car. You enter the parking lot and hand over control, and the car and lot work together to park you safely in the best available space.
Some cars already have those. I've got a car from 2017 that has some kind of sensors wrapping all the way around the bumper. When I'm parked between two cars, it can detect a car roughly 15-20 feet away as soon as I get an inch or two of my bumper clear of the other cars.
It does lack any spatial indicators to the driver, though. It just plays a beep, but it doesn't seem to play the beep from the side of the car the danger is in, nor does it beep louder when they're closer. Still, it works remarkably well. Reliably detects pedestrians and vehicles (even while I'm moving, which is impressive, because it doesn't go off for parked cars when I start moving).
I think it's the Dodge ParkSense, but I bought the car used so there's a possibility it's something aftermarket.
It's saved my ass a number of times. I'm in jacked-up pickup truck country, so it is often impossible for me to see pedestrians about to walk behind me because of the lifted truck, and likewise the pedestrians can't see me until they're behind me.
The one time I was hit by a car as a pedestrian was a driver who wasn't paying attention. He was making a perfectly legal left turn at a green light, except for the pedestrians in the way (me and my girlfriend).
The danger with an autonomous vehicle is it not seeing you. The danger with a driver is not noticing you.
I am a safe driver. (My measure: two moving violations in nearly 40 years of driving, the last one 16 years ago. No accidents in 19 years, no injury accidents ever. And I've driven daily for the whole time.)
In the past couple of weeks, I've narrowly avoided hitting pedestrians three different times. Each time, the pedestrian was somewhere other than a valid crosswalk (once was on a highway exit). In each case, I think an autonomous vehicle could have handled it better than me.
Maybe a "perfect" autonomous vehicle would've reacted better... But, I'm pretty sure that lady with her bicycle walking across the street in Arizona would say differently in regards to Uber's program. I mean, it was a perfect test case for such a system. The guy whose Tesla drove into the side of a semi-truck might feel differently too. Oh and the one in a Tesla who was driven into a barrier in Mountain View and the car caught fire... He died too.
A perfect autonomous car sure sounds nice - but will it ever arrive? Would it have just hit 1 of those pedestrians instead? Would it just go, ding, and suddenly you're in control? Would it kill 1 and then the company would have the data to know to not kill pedestrians in that one specific example? How many people would have to die as test subjects before the system would be better than people? And what if it never got there but you still killed all those folks anyway?
When a human kills someone with a car because they're drunk, or texting, I don't have much empathy for them.
I read a statistic long ago - don't know how true it is, but it feels truthy - that half of all traffic fatalities happen between 9pm and 3am on friday and saturday nights. The fact that autonomous systems will never be intoxicated, distracted, or emotional makes me feel much safer.
A brick tied to the gas pedal will also never be intoxicated. It takes more than inability for intoxication to make a system that can drive a car safely.
Maybe not 50%, but there's certainly a strong bias in that data toward friday/saturday nights. Since the data resets at midnight rather than on bar hours, look at the difference in midnight-4am data on saturday and sunday mornings, vs the rest of the week.
Those are also the only nights when people are out at all. People who have to be at work on weekday mornings aren't driving home from visiting their parents late on a Tuesday night, they're doing it late on a Saturday night. Yeah, it probably is alcohol but there's a lot of confounding factors.
It only makes me feel safer if those systems are substantially safer than humans.
If the systems are broadly as safe as humans _including_ a significant set who are drunk / high / distracted, that feels subjectively much less safe even though the statistical number of accidents is the same.
Everybody drives better than the average, until they get distracted or tired. A AV driver that passes the standardised driving test 1M times in a row is good for me.
Well, now we've transferred the responsibility: Now the programmers of the car's AI must never be intoxicated, distracted, or emotional while creating it. Also, the business people managing the programmers must not be greedy, callous, or incompetent, which is a tough sell.
So we need AI driver certification then. Just like we have with people. If the AI can past the, perhaps 5x human capability test, its licensed to drive, just like the 16 year old teenager driving his new truck on the highway behind you with his four buddies scolling coors.
My mother got her first vaccination shot yesterday. She's in a nursing home in Virginia. She's already had one COVID exposure (luckily she didn't get it), and it's just scary there.
Bucatini is the best pasta shape, though. Comedy always has that grain of truth in it. If you can somehow get past the great bucatini shortage of 2020, make some cacio e pepe with it. Trust me.
This is the gentrification problem. Make the community more desirable, and you make it increasingly more expensive for the existing residents. It's hard to balance these things.
In the case of Minneapolis, the city committed to a plan (Minneapolis2040) to increase housing density. And a lot of that new apartment/condo construction (mostly on unused or old industrial land) is necessarily out of financial reach for average residents. But the increased supply helps protect the prices for the existing houses and older apartments, whether privately owned or rentals.
It's not perfect, it's arguably not even good, but it's a tradeoff most Minneapolis residents can live with.
I'm one of those who probably cannot be convinced to go back to the office. Why would I want to go back to losing an hour and a half a day to commuting? What problem does this solve for me? I find most aspects of my job are actually easier when working remotely - in particular, being able to get people to leave me the hell alone for those two or three hour blocks of concentration. I used to have to go hide at the office in order to work without someone asking me a question every fifteen minutes.
When I was in the Bay Area, I was commuting 2-2.5 hours a day from Lafayette to the city, on BART, for almost 10 years. I moved to San Diego and the commute was still an hour+ most days (20 minutes there, 45+ minutes back).
Every time I think, well would be nice to go back into the office, I think about all the wasted time just getting to one and I am disabused of the notion rather quickly.
I can't. But I do find they're less likely to interrupt in chat than they are in a physical space.
Also, it's a lot easier for me to finish what I'm doing before answering a chat than it is to finish what I'm doing and answer someone standing next to me. Although I'm known for putting a finger up in the air at them and making them wait.
