If the morning and the night had a fight, who'd win? My money's on mornings. Nights may be sleeker and, on the face of it, more dangerous, but mornings are definitely harder. It's strange that staying up late at night is somehow regarded as "cooler" than getting up at the crack of dawn, when it's the latter that truly separates the men from the boys. Any wuss can stay up until 4am swilling cocktails and jabbering, whereas queuing silently for a bus at 5.30am in the middle of winter requires a level of genuine grit normally reserved for the likes of the ancient mariner.

At what point, incidentally, does the night officially turn into morning? I'd say, regardless of whether the sun has bothered rising yet or not, the morning only truly starts at the point where you wouldn't have to apologise to your neighbours if you accidentally set off a bullhorn in your living room. Somewhere around 8am, in other words. Anything earlier than that is just inhumane.

The night/morning divide has been on my mind of late because my current circumstances have required me to become an early riser. I'm not a natural morning person. Left to my own devices, with no work commitments or sense of purpose, my sleeping pattern tends to drift into student mode, ambling further and further past the horizon until it gets to the point where I'm waking up at 1pm and hitting the sack around six in the morning. I eventually become fully nocturnal - like a vampire, but more of a loser, and with markedly less capacity for transforming into a bat and flapping around a castle scaring virgins.

Traditionally, anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves working with me discovers very quickly that there's little point scheduling meetings first thing in the morning, because I'll either miss the start by 45 minutes (then waste another half hour defensively explaining that my alarm didn't go off and so on), or turn up bleary-eyed and useless, having stayed awake all night because I was so spooked by the thought of oversleeping.

But all that's had to change of late. I've somehow got into the habit of rising early and, boy, oh boy, it's an exciting journey into a whole new world. For one thing, I've discovered an entire species of human being that I rarely come into contact with: London's commuters.

Their existence never fails to surprise me. I'd always thought of the mornings as essentially uninhabitable, like the planet Mercury. But no. I head out the door at 7am and there they are - actual live people! - making me jerk with astonishment each time. It's like lifting a rock and seeing life unexpectedly teeming below. Although it's not actually teeming most of the time. A lot of it is simply standing around, lined up silently at the bus stop like a sorrowful row of Antony Gormley figurines, suffering one indignity after another. Cramped conditions, busted LED signs, bursts of syncopated marching interspersed with the occasional frenzied dash, freezing skies, freezing breath, freezing, pissing rain ... their lives are a hilarious cycle of misery. Or rather, it would be hilarious if I didn't have to join them each morning.

Still, apparently that's all on the way out. According to the Economist, thanks to the ongoing technological revolution, the commuter of yesteryear is gradually being replaced by the "urban nomad" of tomorrow. A combination of burgeoning Wi-Fi access and increasingly smart-arsed gadgetry is making location increasingly irrelevant for many workers: wherever they are, they can still communicate with colleagues, access documents, and type up blisteringly dull reports.

There's no need to physically head into work, unless you work in a chip shop, and even then scientists are close to cracking a method for frying potatoes via broadband and emailing them direct to your customers' stomachs.

The upshot of all this being that the early morning commute is set to slowly dissipate from a concentrated frenzy of furrow-browed scampering into a sort of fuzzy, laid-back cloud in which worker bees drift hither and thither, sometimes staying at home, sometimes buzzing round town, touching down in a Starbucks every five minutes to stare at a BlackBerry or something modern like that.

The very notion of geography has been shattered as surely as if someone had written the word "geography" on a plate and hurled it to the floor in a touristy Greek restaurant. And it'll be a bit less cramped at the bus stop as a result.

Having conquered space, technology should now set about conquering time. It's all very well being able to hold a video conference without leaving your own toilet, but there's still that pesky need to communicate with people in real time, which means being awake at the same moment they are. And in my experience other people have an irritating tendency to get up early and stand around tapping their watch. What I want is a Sky+ system for all human interactions, so I can store conversations up and then play them back at a time that suits me, preferably the middle of the night, which is my natural habitat.

But then there are all sorts of things I want that the world of science has yet to deliver. The real-world Sky+ system is just one of them. There is still no sign of the hovercar, the robot butler, or the pill that tastes like an entire Sunday roast, and I distinctly remember ordering all three way back in 1978 when I was seven years old and capable of soaring optimism. Now I'm older, I'll simply settle for a lie-in. Such is life.