Commuting after AGI

James Madsen leaves his apartment in Portland at 7:42 AM. By 8:14 AM, he is stepping into the Western Grid Operations Center in downtown San Francisco, 870 kilometers away.

He cannot do his job from home. As a Critical Infrastructure Supervisor, his role requires physical presence at the facility that coordinates power distribution across eleven states. The AGI handles optimization, load balancing, predictive maintenance. But when systems fail in ways the models didn’t anticipate, a human must be present to authorize overrides, coordinate with field teams, and make judgment calls that no algorithm is permitted to make alone.

He is one of 31 million North Americans who commute to work in an era when travel has become almost frictionless—because some jobs still require hands in rooms where the stakes are measured in millions of lives.

The numbers tell a clear story. In 2025, approximately 27% of North American workers were fully remote. By 2049, that figure has reached 71%, with another 19% hybrid. Only 10% of the workforce commutes daily.

The reasons are obvious. When AGI handles most cognitive coordination, when holographic presence achieves 94% fidelity ratings, when every home contains workspace infrastructure that surpasses what corner offices offered a generation ago, the case for physical commuting collapses.

Yet thirty-one million people still make the journey. They are disproportionately concentrated in roles where presence isn’t preference but necessity: critical infrastructure supervision, emergency medical backup, physical security, judicial proceedings, and the handful of manufacturing processes still requiring human oversight.

These are the workers society decided must be *there*—not as holograms, not as remote operators, but as bodies in rooms where failure cascades into catastrophe.

What makes their commutes bearable—even pleasant—is infrastructure that would have seemed hallucinatory in 2025.