Saccarina‘s dismissal of “trendforskning” reminded me of a “news” item a week or so back, where people who are supposed to know about these things made predictions about the future. The predictions mainly fell into the category “blindingly obvious, aaargh, hand me my sunglasses, please, for the love of God!” but one or two – ok, I exaggerate: one – stood out:
“Planes will be increasingly automated and we will no longer need pilots.”
Yeah. Despite the last few days chaos in Scandinavia because of dissatisfied pilots calling in sick THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL I’D GO UP IN A PLANE WITHOUT A PILOT!
I don’t doubt that planes will become more automated. But machinery fails. Machinery fails quite alarmingly often, in fact. And I can’t really see the stewardess pressing the reset button and not-so-automagically everything is hunky-dory again. Can you?