Back in my day, the future still held promise — and popular culture reflected that. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, humanity had all but perfected itself, aside from a few bad-apple admirals. In Back To The Future Part II, everyone had flying cars and hoverboards by the year 2015. In The Jetsons, the everyday-man protagonist could afford a house, a flying car, a stay-at-home wife, two kids, and a robot maid — all on the wages he earned working just two hours per week.
Today, however, such optimistic portrayals of the future have all but vanished: no longer can we take them seriously. The mirage of prosperity and progress we were chasing has evaporated, abandoning us deep in a capitalist wasteland. Collectively, we now rubbing our eyes, looking around, and realizing with dismay that it’s 2023 and everything sucks.
Absent is the flying car, and in its place are crumbling public transportation systems. Over the holidays these left millions of people stranded, separated from their luggage, denied their one annual family visit, and fighting for a refund. From air to rail to rubber, private carriers sold tickets they had neither the staff nor resources to honor. Southwest airlines, after receiving huge COVID bailouts that it spent rewarding its shareholders, suffered a complete meltdown. Via Rail was forced to apologize for leaving train passengers stranded for more than 18 hours with no food or water. Greyhound, until recently the dominant intercity bus carrier in Canada, has now abandoned the country altogether, leaving a huge vacuum that smaller companies are still scrambling to fill; the bus I took from Vancouver to Kelowna was hours late, had no working bathroom, and was driven by a man who was clearly frustrated with his working conditions.
Unsurprisingly, in retrospect, within days this carrier suffered not one accident but two, the second one killing at least four people and injuring dozens of others.1 According to some reports, the bus may have gone airborne before it crashed onto its side — not the image we once had when we thought about the flying vehicles of the future.
Absent, too, is the two-hour work week, and in its place are more grim realities. A rising cost of living. A housing crisis. Yet another looming recession whose brunt will be borne by workers and the poor. Orwellian levels of workplace surveillance, and an equally Orwellian public discourse in which the term “labor shortage” is used to describe the current shortage of decent jobs, and the term “time theft” is reserved to describe a crime committed, not by bosses, but workers.
Welcome, everyone, to the future.
The problem is not the rate of technological advancement, it is worth emphasizing. Certainly it is not the absence of flying cars.2 Technology seems to be doing quite well, in fact. I mean, virtual reality? 3D printers? Pegasus? Surely the source of our collective disillusionment with the future has little to do with its technological sophistication.
The true culprit, rather, is our accurate perception that technology — on balance — has simply stopped improving our lives as poor and working class people. Indeed, increasingly it has been pitted against us, exaggerating rather than leveling the economic disparity (itself growing) between us the rich.3 This problem has no technological fix; in our current social context, new technology can only give us further cause for disillusionment.
The future is meow
To illustrate these points, take robot waiters. That’s right — robots that serve food. If you are not aware, restaurants actually have these now: I saw one for myself after surviving my recent trip to Kelowna. There I was, at a mostly-empty Smitty’s family restaurant of all places, and without warning this miracle of technology appears and delivers food to the table next to me as I surreptitiously watched out of the corner of my eye just in case this was actually all quite normal (I haven’t been getting out much).
My instincts were not entirely misplaced, it turns out: increasingly, this really is the new normal. Numerous restaurants across BC already have these “Bellabots”, from Kelowna to Vancouver to Victoria to Naniamo to Kamloops. Across the country and around the world — Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Poland — the picture is the same: more and more restaurants staffed by little cat-faced robots that can navigate the room, avoid obstacles, and interact with customers — meowing to let them know their food has arrived, singing them “Happy Birthday”, changing facial expressions, and purring when touched.
Here is a taste of precisely the kind of future that was still being sold to us back in the 80’s. I mean, robots delivering food to the tables of poor and working class people? This is some real Orbit City-level stuff. Local media coverage of the Kelowna Smitty’s Bellabot reflects this, inviting us to “Live like the Jetsons” and proclaiming “The future is now”.
But in the harsh morning light of 2023, such amazing technology looks far less attractive than it did in the intoxicated fantasies of our youth. To make it even palatable, it now has to be given a green makeover — thus the Bellabot is distributed in Canada by a company called GreenCo Robots. It has to be given a cute face to mask its role in depriving customers of yet another opportunity for human interaction, and in outsourcing to them yet another task (ie., unloading their food). The fact that it is designed and manufactured by a Chinese company, Pudu Robotics, is increasingly uncomfortable. And Pudu must take great care to maintain the fiction that Bellabots are easing the so-called “labor shortage” but somehow not to posing a threat to the livelihoods of service workers — a charade still indulged by the ruling class more generally.
Poor and working people, on the other hand — our common sense now confirmed by bitter experience — know the ugly truth that this is precisely the point of robot waiters: in short, to maximize profit and minimize wages. They are not in the interest of workers; they supply no customer demand. They do very little for poor and working people at all, in fact — if anything, they work against us. They may bring us food, but we are not who they serve.
These are the new supermarket self-checkouts, which no one asked for but which have become ubiquitous nonetheless, accomplishing little beyond reducing our job opportunities and — just as importantly — making our jobs worse. And as automation has swept through the service industry, and the manufacturing industry, wreaking havoc on worker’s lives, and as jobs as seemingly resistant to automation as tree planting come under threat, it has become impossible for us to look forward to future technological possibilities. Instead, we are obliged to keep looking over our shoulders, wondering if our job is next.
No longer can we even tell ourselves comforting fairy tales about a seamless mass transition of workers into well-paid tech jobs: as I write, tech companies across the board are slashing jobs — 68,000 so far in the first month of 2023. Tellingly, Pudu Robotics has itself issued hundreds if not thousands of layoffs, dramatically downsizing even as its automatons conquer the global service industry.
No law of nature has mandated this cruel reality. It was not entirely naive of us to have hoped for something better. Technology really could be assisting workers rather than undermining them; progress really could be translated into more leisure time for workers, just as it did for George Jetson. This future was possible. Indeed, it still is.
But we will never get there under the leadership of a clique of un-elected business owners and disproportionately psychopathic corporate executives. Their myopic self-interests will never guide us to a better tomorrow. Just look around: the natural environment consumed, and the built environment set against us. Little wonder that our hope — that most precious of resources — is rapidly fading. How could it not? They told us the future would be a wonderful place in which technology worked for the benefit all humanity, and then they brought us to a smoking ruin that is littered with evidence to the contrary.
So far the two publicly identified dead are 41-year-old Karanjot Singh Sodhi and 18-year-old Kathy Kim Lee.
After all, this is a trivial technicality to the rich and famous, who are increasingly taking their private jets up for 20 or even 10 minute flights.
Illustrating these points in his excellent recent video What The Hell, America?, historian Thomas Frank points out that the world’s richest man in the mid-1960’s (John Paul Getty, worth $1.2 billion) loved to complain that the middle class could afford to live in almost as much luxury as he did, while here in 2023, multi-billionaires compete in their own personal space races and the masses languish.