We've Seen the Future of Work and It Works, But Very Differently

For Miller, this vision of the office is not a guess or a prediction. It is a certainty, a direct result of two irresistible forces Miller says are rapidly reshaping work -- and all of life -- at the turn of the millennium: knowledge aggregation and infrastructure disaggregation -- "Miller's Yin-Yang Principles," as he calls them. "You can understand all of human history with these two principles," says Miller.

Knowledge aggregation is just what it sounds like -- accumulating knowledge. It's libraries, teams, war rooms, the computer chip. It's why people want a place to hang their flip charts: learning takes time, and there's no point in having to learn things over and over again. Information persistence, says Miller, is a principle that most companies have yet to grasp -- leave stuff up on the wall, so you see it all the time, and you'll absorb its meaning more completely and more rapidly.

Infrastructure disaggregation is the distribution of the tools to accomplish things. It's the railroad supplanting the Pony Express, the car supplanting the railroad. It's network computers supplanting mainframes, it's laptops instead of desktops, cell-phone networks instead of wires. In Miller's view, the whole arc of human achievement is bound up with knowledge accumulation -- tribes, cities, corporations, research universities -- and infrastructure disaggregation -- the highway, the copy machine, the suburb. When the principles overlap, the combined impact can transform whole nations.

The Internet, says Miller, is a stunning combination of knowledge aggregation and infrastructure disaggregation. At its core, the new economy is all about gathering and archiving more and more information, information that is available to more people, more quickly, with less effort. While this superficially increases our independence from particular places and people, it ultimately increases our dependence on each other. There is far more data than any one person can grasp, manage, make sense of. That's why cross-functional teams are the crossroads of the knowledge economy.

"It turns out," says Miller, "you need other people to know things. You have to share with other people. Two people, working together, learn things faster than individuals alone. Pairs solve problems faster than individuals can. The organization of the office has never understood that. "That's why the office will persist and grow. Because knowledge aggregation is faster in groups. The office has shifted from a place to work as an individual to a place to work as a group."

Miller is convinced that the changes going on now are "a 100-year event. Work and home will be indistinguishable," he says. "Both environments will be designed with exactly the same criteria. The fundamentals of life are fun, learning, work, living, and visiting. Right now, these things are separated. We have Disney for fun, we have schools, offices, homes, and hotels. In the future, all spaces will have all attributes -- just the emphasis will be different. There will be a lot of the home at the office, and a lot of the office at the home."

Computers will be ubiquitous but transparent; they will be redesigned for simultaneous group work rather than for individual work. Video screens will cover whole walls, both at home and at the office, and viewers will be able to control how many channels they want to watch simultaneously - 1 or 15. The era of the cubicle will wither -- rooms will become easily changeable, even rooms at home. "You'll want the room to switch between fun and a project," says Miller. "It will be the equivalent of convertible beds."

With learning -- what people think of as training now -- increasingly important at the office, offices will have theaters. "Information is effectively presented in different ways," says Miller. "Think of a business simulation of a competitive market that's like a ride at Disney World. You'd learn like crazy." Already, companies are using virtual reality theaters for training and presentations.

And the furniture?

The furniture, says Miller, will be smart. "Everything will be smart," he says. "Nicholas Negroponte, from MIT, said in his book Being Digital that atoms are over, it's all bits now, because bits are smart and atoms aren't. But that's not true. Are atoms smart? What's the smartest atom? DNA, which created life! The right metaphor is, everything is smart. There will be smart furniture. Envision a table that knows who you are, that can talk to you, give you directions. Why do objects have to be dumb? "The answer," says Bill Miller, "is in the furniture."

Charles Fishman (fish@nando.net) is a journalist based in Raleigh, North Carolina.