In the movie Airport, the movie that kicked off the Hollywood disaster flicks in the 1970s, Burt Lancaster as the airport manager juggles weather delays, mechanical failures, disgruntled passengers, and a looming crisis that could send everything spiraling into chaos. Watching it today, the film feels dated—no security lines snaking through terminals, no smartphones blinking with flight updates, no AI predicting delays before they happen.
And yet, despite all the changes, Lancaster’s stress is instantly recognizable. The technology may be different, the cultural mores and procedures might have changed, but his managerial challenges and his human struggles remain remarkably familiar.
How much of what we believe to be new is just an old problem in a new setting?
Once upon a time, we shoveled coal into steam engines, ensuring that trains ran on time. Grueling, dangerous work—but also essential. Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape comes to mind.
Today, AI algorithms hum in the background, optimizing airline schedules, and yet human managers still wrestle with impossible deadlines, malfunctioning systems, and irate customers. The coal dust is gone, but the stress remains?
Luddites smashed textile machinery in 19th-century England, fearing they would be replaced by technology. Their concerns were brushed aside—as society marched on! Now, with AI generating fiction, diagnosing disease, and learning faster than we can keep up, our current fears seem less antiquated. It was perhaps naive to assume we were immune to obsolescence. Yuval Noah Harari calls citizens the new “useless class.” That’s a bit dramatic and risks misinterpretation of his intent. But his point is well taken - we should expect displacement.
We tell ourselves that technology will make life easier. When the printing press arrived, it forced societies to reckon with an avalanche of new ideas. Railroads shrank distances, and introduced new systems of trade, bureaucracy, and, railway accidents. Today, artificial intelligence promises efficiency, but already we see the trade-off: do we understand the decisions it makes? Are we comfortable with the power we are handing over?
Perhaps it is an illusion is that our decision-making has improved. We imagine ourselves as rational creatures, making choices based on data, evidence, logic, and clarity. And yet, as behavioral scientists remind us, we are creatures of perception, easily swayed by framing, nudges, and unconscious biases. The rise of FinTech promises smarter investments, better retirement planning, perfectly optimized decisions. But has human nature changed? We still panic, we still fall for illusions, we still react based on how things feel, rather than how they are. Deepseek anyone?
Even our sense of self, that anchor of identity, turns out to be surprisingly malleable. I once read Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind, and one word stuck with me: confabulation. The idea that we don’t outright lie to ourselves, but we fill in the gaps of our memories, reshaping the truth without realizing it. It makes me wonder: as we integrate more technology into our lives—memory aids, AI-driven assistants, neural implants—at what point do we stop being ourselves?
If I replace a knee, a kidney, my hearing… fine. But what if I replace my memory with a perfect digital archive? My thoughts with an AI-enhanced version of my own mind? Would you still recognize me? Would I still recognize myself?
Education, too, once seemed an unshakable foundation—books, classrooms, professors standing at a podium. Then came MOOCs, online learning, and Sal Khan reaching millions of students with the click of a button. It’s exhilarating—knowledge, unchained from physical space! But also, unsettling. If a university degree is no longer a necessity, what happens to the institutions that have shaped society for centuries? Do we lose something in the transition, or is this just another iteration of progress, like Gutenberg’s press before it?
My dad once said to me over dinner, “answers evolve over time, the fundamental questions persist.”
How do we find meaning in our work? How do we navigate uncertainty? How do we decide what is real, what is true, what matters? Technology shifts the scenery, but the human drama remains the same.
If the Burt Lancaster character were running an airport today (Die Hard 2!), he’d be drowning in AI-generated reports, biometric security checks, and data-driven decision models. But he’d perhaps still be exhausted, still be negotiating impossible demands, still be dealing with that irate passenger at check-in.
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