Travel to a meeting, to a conference, the All-Hands meeting. Remember, how sweet it could be? The early morning departure, saying goodbye to the loving family and off to a new world. Could be alone in a new city and exploring, in the hotel or the piazza with time to think. Could be finally meeting people in person after months of telephone meetings. Could be concentrating on a task with pair-programming, without the distractions of normal life. But for me the best business travel was being part of a larger group, your work colleagues converted to actual people instead of the roles they play in the office, the shared sense of quest and achievement as the kiosk is finally set, the presentation and demonstrations delivered, relief after all the planning back home. Then the conquering heroes convene in the hotel bar, with wacky ideas exposed and perhaps taken seriously. Building human trust in the group that comes in so useful back in the office when we need to pull as a team. Of course business travel had its crappy side too. The feet-smell of the inside of the airplane, being angry at others who fly more and thus have an iota more comfort, the delays and jetlag and lost days. Going to a dull place you have been to many times, already thinking of arriving home before you even set off. But for both the good trips and the bad trips, business travel is on the wane post-Covid, because now we have found out how to do without it. The bean-counters will realise they don't need to pay those huge budgets, and so it will become an extravagance rather than a necessity, a sort of joke like the three-martini lunch of the 1950’s.
The conference I have just attended was a well-orchestrated mix of Zoom, Gathertown, and Slack, without leaving my home office. Between these three technologies, about 75% of the purposes of business travel were accomplished. Zoom for the lectures, with well-established protocols such as clicking the “hands up” button to ask a question. Muting the audio, so others don't hear when the postman comes and your dog barks. The second technology is Gathertown: how to talk to others in small serendipitous groups. There is a floor-plan of a conference centre, with traditional names for the areas like “foyer”, “lounge”, and even “coffee”, although obviously you are at home and have to get your own coffee from your own kitchen. Each person has an avatar, and you are connected by audio and video only when nearby. It’s an unscripted interaction, its bumping into people and chatting. You can hang out with your friends, and meet others you don't already know. You see a couple of names on the screen and go over there, then when you are close, you see their video and hear their audio. There is a “poster room” where people have put up visual material about their pet project, and their avatar may also be there, so you can talk to them and discuss the poster. The third component of the virtual conference is Slack, a chat and messaging platform, for asking questions, making announcements, and sharing information. The session organiser runs the Zoom session, taking questions from Slack, the only one besides the speaker to have audio switched on. After the session we all “go over” to Gathertown for chitchat and posters.
Just two years ago, the choice for a business meeting was telephone or travel – and here I use the old word “telephone” to include now-defunct technologies with bad video. The virtual experience was thin gruel compared to the real experience. In those days we also thought that human presence on Mars and Enceladus would need actual meat-based humans, with their frail lungs and frail bladders, in order to say that we have visited those planets. But the virtual meeting I just attended was a good fraction of the experience of the real conference: making new contacts, exchanging ideas, selling my pet project, speaking and being heard. I think people will soon come to realise the potential of the virtual experience, that it can be almost as good as being there, at a tiny fraction of the cost. Instead of embracing the old-fashioned ideas of certain American billionaires, the people of Earth should be proud that we have already sent five scientists to Mars – named Sojourner, Opportunity, Spirit, Curiosity, and Perseverance.
The ostensible justifications for big travel budgets – by which we would convince the bean-counters – are now satisfied by virtual systems, and in the future travel budgets will be much less. The other reasons for travel – serendipity, pair programming, trust-building – are too evanescent to be used to justify real travel. If the world can discipline itself just a little about climate change, air travel will become much more expensive, so there is another reason for restricting business travel. Compared to the real thing, the virtual meeting is the cheap version of a business meeting, it’s like a weekly phone call to Mum instead of having breakfast together. But it’s here to stay, and we will be spending a lot more time at home, and a lot less time out there, hunting and gathering.