Future Imperfect #33: Pulling air travel into the 21st century
Welcome to Future Imperfect! This week I’ve been reading about the many failings of air travel in America, the (potential) rise of seasteading, the job retraining gap, and the end of the Interface Series. Oh, and a homemade fusion reactor.
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Pulling air travel into the 21st century
Popular Mechanics has a special feature this week, How to Fix Flying. From revamping the world’s air traffic control system to a sneak peek at the airplanes of the future, it’s easy to forget that flying “doesn’t have to be so miserable.”
It’s hard to pick just one excerpt from this piece, but I’ll home in on a major change to the way planes are currently routed around the United States:
Radar relies on line of sight from the ground antenna to the plane. Aircraft flying at low levels or in mountainous terrain may lose contact. Because the plane’s exact location is unclear and communications may be spotty, controllers put heavy restrictions on where planes are routed and what weather conditions they can fly through. Another big flaw is speed. The rotating radar dish will update an aircraft’s position only once every 12 seconds. That means an airplane traveling at 500 mph could be more than a mile and a half away from the position a controller sees on her radar scope.
The FAA announced a GPS-based program called Automatic Dependence Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) that would broadcast a plane’s precise position to controllers and to nearby aircraft every second. This technology is the cornerstone of the much-touted NextGen Air Transportation system. Proposed in 2003, this satellite-based system would eliminate the need for antiquated ground-based radar and radio. The FAA has spent years testing this system, and in 2010 the agency mandated that all aircraft flying within controlled U.S. airspace must update their transponders by 2020.
It’s not happening. While satellite tracking would make aviation better and safer, many private operators — be they big aviation companies or Joe Pilot who owns his own plane — receive no immediate benefit from equipping planes with expensive new transponders. The upgrade could cost thousands of dollars, so many people are playing wait-and-see with the FAA, hoping to goad the agency into extending the deadline or offering incentives to make the switch. Airlines, too, are also hesitant to upgrade. Even the United States Air Force can’t meet the deadline.
Why does this matter? How confident do you feel in flying in the U.S. when we’re relying on 1950's-era technology to route more than one million people around the country every day? Clearly America’s air traffic control system needs an upgrade. Hopefully, though, that happens before a major incident.
The (not so) final frontier
The next frontier might not be space—instead, it might be in international waters. From Atlas Obscura, the rising potential for seasteading.
Voluntary anti-government communities, be they pirates or hippie communes, have existed for centuries. Seasteaders aim to take this concept to the next level, literally creating their voluntary societies from the ground up using experimental technology and techniques. Plans for these floating cities generally see them located on the high seas, outside of the Exclusive Economic Zones that are controlled by different nations.
Many of today’s aspiring seasteaders want to connect their private dwellings as detachable, modular houses. If they dislike how things are going in their new communities, they can just float away.
The less radically-minded might wonder: why go to all the trouble? Why not just haul off into the woods and live secluded from pesky neighbors? Most seasteaders would say these questions miss the point. They aren’t just looking for solitude, they’re looking for freedom from government control. Some are looking for new ways to survive in the rising waters of climate change. They’re looking, plainly, to change the world. And they have a lot to say about how.
Why does this matter? In a world where terra nullius has been virtually nonexistent for several decades, I get that seasteading can be an attractive concept. Why deal with pesky government regulations or really anyone in society you disagree with when you can just set sail?
But there are many obstacles, including money, resources, and questions of national sovereignty. The biggest thing in my mind, hinted at in the article, is security—that frequently underappreciated aspect of governance. When you’re out on your seastead, you won’t have the Coast Guard there to rescue you when you get caught in a storm. You won’t have the Navy there to defend you against pirates or rival seasteaders who want what you have. I’ll wait to get in on this until I see some serious proposals to solve the question of seasteading security.
Working for the weekend
Two observations in employment. First of all, a scenario in Spain, where there are 5 million people out of work, but a vast number of jobs that are unfillable.
Even with close to 5 million people out of work, the next prime minister will face labor shortages with employers struggle to find the staff they need.
“It’s a paradox,” said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. “The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we’re seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don’t have the skills employers demand.”
From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe. Randstad estimates that Spanish companies may struggle to fill almost 2 million posts through 2020.
So we have a vast number of people who lack the skills to meet employer demand. If you think internships are the answer, let’s take a look at the other side of the Atlantic, where workforce retraining often is overlooked in favor of cheaper work placement programs.
It’s hard to muster enthusiasm these days for the prospects of workers on all but the topmost rungs of the labor market. Wages of high school dropouts are lower than they were at the turn of the century in real terms. The same goes for workers with a high school diploma, and also for workers who went to college but stopped short of a bachelor’s degree.
This stagnation kindles the insurgent campaign of Donald Trump, who promises to somehow fix everything by walling off Mexico and slapping anti-dumping tariffs against China. An overwhelming majority of economists have panned his “solution” as a distraction — indeed, a surefire way to cripple the economy….But are there really no ideas, short of throwing a wrench into the gears of the global economy?
The article calls out WorkAdvance in particular as a program showing promise, but it’s really a day late and a dollar short.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States government spends only 0.03 percent of its gross domestic product on worker training. Denmark, whose policies to bring workers into work have gained praise around the world, spends proportionately almost 18 times as much. France spends 12 times as much; Germany seven times.
Americans’ main problem may not be that there are no solutions for the workers’ plight. It is just easier, not to say more politically rewarding, to scream at the Mexicans and the Chinese.
Why does this matter? It’s hard to argue that government dollars invested in people are dollars wasted. To be sure, this is only one part of needed reforms across the education system, from primary and secondary education to college and adult learning. But if you’re like me, seeing a vast swath of the global population with skills utterly mismatched to the current job market and likely lacking the money to go back to pursue further education, is it really smart policy to write them all off?
A perfect loop
In case you missed it, 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 wrapped up the Interface Series on Reddit this week. Superb at times, meandering at others, but enough throughout to hold my interest at least. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s the full narrative. Here, an excerpt from the conclusion.
The tunnel leads to more tunnels. More stairs. Empty rooms. The black air teems with bits of dust that shine in the flashlight. My skin tingles all over. Is it the dust clinging to me? Or is it just the low-grade terror that has filled my body? It reminds me of the tingle that filled my limbs on all those mornings before the first drink. How I had begged for that feeling to end. But now I know it will never end. There will always been another awful morning, another fuckup, another withdrawal — unless I go forward. Not away from the nightmare. But into it.
But it goes on and on. I cannot believe how long the tunnels are, how many rooms there are, how deep the stairs are. I can taste the dust on my lips, and I pull my shirt up over my nose. Occasionally I come across an old metal chair or some rotting boards but nothing else. I’m hoping to find some scrap of paper or maybe a nametag, some clue as to who built this monstrosity, but there is nothing but dust, more and more dust.
I stop and watch the dust float across my flashlight’s beam. Holding out my sweating, shaking hand, I let a dark speck settle on my fingertip. Looking at it closely, I see that it’s in the shape of a flake. Is it dust? Or is it ash?
A wave of dread moves through me. Could it be from a burned interface? Is it human ash?
The wave of dread is followed by a flurry of nervous wisecracks. Fucking dust. What the fuck do I know about dust or ash? I’m not some dust expert. Maybe it’s just flaky dust. Maybe it’s dandruff. Maybe I’ll find a huge cache of used wigs down here. “Did you find an interdimensional portal?” “No, but these wigs are in pretty good condition. Look, we got a mid 60s Dusty Springfield here.”
I wipe my hand on my shirt and keep moving forward. Just a few steps later, my flashlight finds the end of the block tunnel and the beginning of the rock cave. Just like Shawn said. God, can it be real? Maybe it’s an ordinary rock tunnel. Maybe it’s just part of an unfinished…
Reaching out of from the shadowy wall, with its bony fingers splayed almost elegantly, is the shape of a human hand.
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