3. Creating a hellish nightmare society where I am not afforded the opportunity to talk to a single random person in the going about of my average day.
If you think the class gaps and problems of lack of cross-socioeconomic empathy are an issue now, wait until a middle class worker can go 24 hours without ever having to interact with anyone making less than them.
"Raise taxes to fund foodstamps? Crazy! I hear the poor are doing just fine eating their insect protein cubes. I saw a report about it on the TV last night!"
I'm middle class and I can go 24 hours or even many days without interacting with anyone. The future is already here. Can't say I'm all that impressed with it.
I've quit my remote job for in-office for this very reason. The hell of constant noise and having to warm up seat for 8 hours (even when I can realistically concentrate on code for maybe 4-6) is better than the hell of sitting at home alone coding for months. I think... (I'm starting the in-office job in a couple weeks).
The problem is, in remote job there are still other people, but they are in remote time zones and your bandwidth to them is frustratingly limited (most communications occur via chat, sometimes a hangout). It does not make the communication less important though - for example, some code nazi on your team will post lots of remarks to your patches in code review and now, instead of going to him and explaining your perspective, you need to painstakingly type it into boxes on Github... My experience was that the review process with such people (when done remotely) takes at least as many calendar days as the work itself. Granted, it's not all useless pedantism - they often want me to rewrite the code so that it's more similar to the rest of the codebase (we were doing Scala+Play, where you often have many ways to approach a problem) - but it would be so much less painful to go over it in person.
If you think the class gaps and problems of lack of cross-socioeconomic empathy are an issue now, wait until a middle class worker can go 24 hours without ever having to interact with anyone making less than them.
"Raise taxes to fund foodstamps? Crazy! I hear the poor are doing just fine eating their insect protein cubes. I saw a report about it on the TV last night!"