The future, by Braniff

Via city of sound, a fabulous 1975 (update: or possibly 1965) commercial about the future of air travel:

The commercial is like a catalog of things that make futurists' professional lives hard.

• The design tries really hard to Look Like the Future. Everyone is wearing these robe-and-cowl things (the women look like Bene Gesserit going clubbing). Chairs have been replaced by giant eggs. (Perhaps in the future people are hatched; the commercial doesn't go there, thankfully.)
• Absolutely ordinary human activities have been automated. People don't walk any more: instead, their chairs are pushed around by robots or something.
• More seriously, the commercial makes the classic mistake of positing vast technological changes, with no accompanying social changes. When you watch, notice that the pilots are all men, and the cabin crew is all female. This is something you see in lots of "home of the future" exhibits. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote about this (PDF) so eloquently, it should be called the Nunberg Error.

But, on the plus side, the commercial does have a personal jet pack.

Technorati Tags: airport, future, travel

Comments

[dH]

So that's past now.

[John Davis]

Why shouldn't all the pilots be men and the cabin crew female in the future? The current fashion may be for men and women to do the same jobs indiscriminately, but who's to say that in some future all the pilots wouldn't be men and all the cabin crew wouldn't be women?

The point about the future is that it is unknown.

John Davis

[Alex Soojung-Kim Pang]

True, the future is unknown, but the particular combination of great technological and great stability in gender roles is one that seem rather suspicious. As Geoff Nunberg points out, too often visions of the future "tend to naturalize contingent social categories like 'the housewife' even as they exaggerate the impact of technological innovations."

Now, it might be the case that in the future gender roles in many professions and industries will restabilize, for whatever combination of reasons. And that this could happen in the airline industry. As John Davis says, the future is unknown.

But perhaps the more likely scenario for the airline industry is its complete automation: not the return of the testosterone-fueled cockpit, but the emergence of a silicon-fueled one. Or, alternately, a UAV-like passenger plane system, in which remote pilots manage takeoff and landing (thus allowing airlines to have a small workforce of pilots switching among flights all day), but the rest of the flight is handled by computers.

[ACM]

Some things are surprisingly accurate:

The identicard: Akin to swiping your credit card at an automated check-in kiosk

Less walking: most airports have 'slidewalks', trams and carts

The mood controler: Similar to chilling out with the personalized, mood-altering music on your iPod--although in Braniff's future you don't have to turn it off before take-off.

Robots: TSA employees aren't quite robots yet--still in the zombie stage, but close.

[StupidHead]

"When you watch, notice that the pilots are all men, and the cabin crew is all female."

That's the way it is now you dumbass! And the way it will always be. Like a girl could actually fly a plane. LOL