Who Gets to Wear the Hat?: Replacement and Representation
Last week United Airlines set off another bomb in the exhausting culture war with this commercial:
In it, they announce their plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots they train in the next decade to be women or people of color. This sparked a flurry of predictable responses claiming that United Airlines is putting the lives of their customers at risk. There were also cries of infantilization with reminders that quotas of this nature lead to a kind of imposter syndrome of the “chosen” asking themselves, “Wait, did I really earn my position in this seat based on my merit and skill? Or was it the accidental organ between my legs or shade of my epidermis that got me here?”
For a moment, let’s set aside the motivations by United to perhaps cash in on a societal moral trend—engaging in a bit of “justice performity” to boost their brand’s image. Of course, that is part of the equation that drives so many of us crazy, but I’d like to focus on something much less appreciated to explain the commercial and the civilizational moment: Wait, is United really putting lives at risk with this policy?
Talented People or Talented Planes?
The frequency chart of fatal commercial aviation incidents per number of flights and miles flown over time looks steeper than the Grand Canyon. This mode travel has become extraordinarily safe and has been that way for quite a while. What are the reasons for this incredible success? Do we think it is because pilots themselves are so much more skilled than they used to be? Is it that the most talented, hardest working, and smartest humans started choosing to become pilots at a higher rate than ever and so the planes started taking off and landing safely? Of course not—it’s the technology.
At the risk of insulting pilots (more on that later), planes themselves got more qualified than ever. The planes are flying themselves to an increasingly large degree.
To highlight this point, consider the Southwest pilot, an absolute creep, who was fired after “exposing” and “relieving himself” while the plane was in air on a flight from Philadelphia to Orlando. While this is certainly gross, crass, and generally irresponsible, it’s also important to note that the plane did not crash while the pilot was ummm... “distracted”. The passengers had no idea of the depravity in the cockpit while they dreamed of Mickey Mouse and landed safely a few hours later.
A human-less train
The monorail AirTrain that endlessly circles the terminals and rental car lots that those same passengers rode before and after their flight did not even have a human conductor. AirTrains strike me as the closest thing to a science-fiction vision of self maintaining societies that we have. True, there is a human assigned to monitor those trains from afar who could intervene if something goes off the rails (har har). This person does need to be skilled and trained to a certain degree, sure. But that level of skill and expertise is a far cry from the train conductors of old who had to operate and be aware of several simultaneous systems and manipulate levers and gears like a surgeon.
This reduction in uniquely narrowed training and aptitude is very much like the pilots who may be required to intervene with manual plane operations when the alarms start chirping up with messages that the computer needs a human to throw a rescue buoy. Hopefully, these moments are incredibly rare and don’t happen when you are a passenger. If you share that hunch, it ought to tell you something about your trust in the computer over the human no matter how skilled you think he or she might be.
I don’t intend to argue that pilots, or train conductors for that matter, have been completely reduced to mere “robot babysitters'', but I won’t shy away from my argument which acknowledges that I would much rather step onto a plane that has a perfectly calibrated and tuned computer and mechanical system with a less than stellar pilot than the inverse situation. And you should too. I’ll also gladly check in on this essay in 30 years to see how the “pilots as robo-sitter” situation looks then. I think that trend moves in one obvious direction.
If anyone is doubting the hypothesis, I am issuing an open challenge:
Who would like to place a bet that United Airways will suffer a substantial (or any?) increase in fatal human caused incidents over the next decade as their pseudo affirmative action policy is rolled out? I don’t think I’ll have any takers. No matter what people like Jeanine Pirro are spitting out at the moment.
And here is the real point, this example of the reduced role of human expertise required to do something as crazy as “fly hundreds of humans through the air over oceans in a metal tube” is particularly interesting, but the trend is felt by more of us and in more jobs and social roles than ever before.
Cool Wings:
“Pilots” has been a top answer for children (especially boys) when asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” for quite a while, though it is sliding down the charts in favor of things like YouTube Star. In the height of the celebrity of Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes, being a pilot when you grew up was all the rage. Little boys would wear costume aviation outfits and run around their backyards, arms outstretched in a fantasy of dodging the clouds. Okay, maybe this vision is a bit idyllic, but the important point is that being a pilot was really “cool”. And the power of “coolness” is real.
As animals who are dependent on each other for survival, we evolved strong instincts related to social trust. In less connected early civilization eras, the moment of coming across a strange human in the wild carried with it plenty of risks and opportunities. A failure of quick judgement could lead to a deadly encounter or a fight over scarce resources. Distrust appears in us as a near default just as quickly as a feeling of hope for cooperation. The “wariness or warmness” we feel towards a stranger happens at a visual glance, unless we hear them first. A rule of thumb to lean more towards warmness if the stranger dressed similarly, looked similar, or (the strongest variable) spoke similarly evolved simply as a way to bet on survival over extinction.
This evolutionary explanation of the roots of what I’m calling “tribalism” is rather mundane. Of course, it is the same foundation for awful and ugly outcomes of complex systems of racism and xenophobia which we’ve all heard so much about lately. But “tribalism” in its generic evolutionary form that I’m talking about—a kind of “similarity at a glance warmness”, gets a bad rap. I contend that it is neither a “feature” or a “bug” of our software, but a supercharged aspect of it which isn’t, and shouldn’t, go away.
The likeness instinct can cultivate meaningful and healthy “tribes” that come with quick signals and outward signs like those of a fan of a sports team who spots a stranger wearing a logo, or a fan of a band who hears a stranger humming her favorite song in the grocery aisle, or a historic geographic community who loves a certain local food which emits a distinct odor that you catch in a taxi cab. And, I will even contend, that the signals of racial ethnicity can cultivate a meaningful bond to collective story. Though that last one is obviously playing with fire, and fraught with all kinds of totalitarian and monolithic-reductionist assumptions.
Dealing with our “likeness impulse” is something that takes careful attention and philosophy. I prefer the language of trying to “transcend” the impulse in regards to our immutable features—things like height, skin color, eye color, physical symmetry. To build a tribe based on those things and weave them “too deeply” into your identity is often a recipe for disaster, especially if it leads to vilifying those so unlucky as to not be blessed with those accidents of birth.
But transcendence of that nature and careful attention is part of a philosophical maturity process which happens with age and experience. Children are particularly susceptible to “likeness impulses”. There is evidence that vocal accent bias starts to form even before birth with the sound of the mother’s voice permeating the womb. When a child sees someone who looks a bit like their parents or adult relatives in a position of admiration and respect from the community (with “coolness”) there is an inescapable tug on the “sameness impulse” which might result in a passing thought of “I can be in that position one day!”
If a little girl steps onto a plane and sees an adult who looks a little bit like her aunt, and that adult is wearing a very cool uniform with a hat no one else gets to wear and has a very neat silver eagle wings pin and everyone (who may or may not look anything like her relatives) passes her with a little nod and smile, it does something - a yank, ever so slight, on the representation lever in her evolved mind. This can have significant confidence boosting impact.
But, of course, there is danger ahead.
The Double-Edged Sword of “Representation Levers” and “Cancel Culture”
The argument goes like this: if technology is replacing rare human expertise in more and more areas but those roles still enjoy a “status boost”, there is an opportunity to exploit the “likeness instinct” and address past injustices without sacrificing public safety.
United Airlines did not need to lobby for any law to be passed for them to pave the way for their emphasis on ethnic and gender representation policy. There is no official legal barrier preventing people of color or women from becoming pilots, though there was a kind of social assumption that it just wasn’t a place for them.
Marlon DeWitt Green applied for a job with Continental Airlines in 1957 and was rejected despite his sterling resume. It took the US Supreme Court ruling in his favor in a 1963 discrimination suit before he could finally fly and become the first black man in America to pilot commercial planes. But disproportionate representation in areas like piloting can become a self entrenching feedback loops without the aid of legal enforcement.
It’s impossible to measure how many young black boys didn’t pursue a dream of becoming a pilot simply because their “representation lever” was never tugged by seeing someone who looked like them greet them on a plane from 1950-1963, but it’s surely a factor to some degree for the current disparity. Trying to do the causal math becomes a hornets nest of confounding variables like the demographics of who is actually getting on planes (something that isn’t cheap to do), and if they are flying for business or leisure. Socio-economic correlations between ethnic groups are undeniable and carry with them tense conversations about the causal role of racism for these conditions. But let’s acknowledge that “representation”, even of the superficial type that I am exploring, really does have an entrenching and dislodging effect.
A Counterexample to Consider: Brain Surgeons of the Future
Imagine a small town with just a few brain surgeons. They are all well respected in town and the children see them receive warm smiles and admiration as they go about their lives. One of the brain surgeons is really good at his job. He is white. The other two surgeons are not so great at brain surgery and they are not white. This town is very isolated. If someone needs emergency brain surgery, these three doctors are the only options.
Now let’s imagine that you are driving your elderly mother and your young child in the car. Suddenly, your mother has a brain emergency. You drive straight to the best brain surgeon in town. Even if you care about and believe in the power of representation and you want your child in the backseat to see a doctor who looks like him save his grandmother’s life, you aren’t about to drive anywhere other than the best doctor in town. This example is easy to understand because brain surgeons are not easily replaced and the stakes are as high as possible.
This is just not the right place in society to try to reach for the “representation lever” of the boy in the backseat. Even if the town dedicated to producing a group of talented non-white brain surgeons for the next generation, the best-of-the-best of those humans, no matter the ethnicity, would be exactly where you would drive your car.
Now let’s say that the really talented brain surgeon was also a jerk. He said some politically controversial and offensive things. But the town is not so eager to demand that he is fired and loses his license—they just can’t afford to throw away such an integral and irreplaceable skill.
But now imagine some future innovations in the field of brain surgery. Imagine that a few machines, equipped with the most robust artificial intelligence and advanced automated tools, is what did the bulk of the medical assessment and the operation itself. A human would monitor the machine and intervene if necessary, but the success rate of brain surgery begins to reach uncannily safe levels because of these innovations. The rates for all 3 of the doctors in town approach 99.9% success and they’ve been at that level for decades.
Suddenly, the entire picture begins to change.
The demands to fire the talented but offensive doctor start to grow louder. People start to lament the ethnic disparities in the field and suggest ways to change it. People start to wish that their kids had more adult figures in town of high status to look up to, and people still really seem to respect and admire those surgeons. Maybe we can focus there?
Suddenly, this picture begins to look a lot more like what I am suggesting is happening to the field of commercial airline pilots.
We Giveth and We Taketh away
When there is a sense of the increasing replaceability of a role which still enjoys social status, the microscope of society can be quite aggressive. One such area of convergence in society, which didn’t need a technology boost to fall into this category, is “Hollywood Actor”. This explains the hyper sensitive attention to the representation/cancel levers in that industry.
I am not saying there aren’t some uncannily talented actors out there who could never be replaced, but I do have the sense that many roles could be filled by hundreds of names picked from a hat and the film wouldn’t suffer at all. It’s also obvious that these roles in society enjoy high status complete with magazine covers and massive social media followings. Little kids look up to the actor who plays their favorite superhero to an extreme degree. The convergence of status and replaceability probably exists nowhere as obviously as it does in a Spiderman costume (sorry, Tobey Maguire).
When the convergence reaches these levels there is a feeling that emerges that “we” (as a society) are sort of granting you the privilege of wearing the suit. And along with this “granting” there is an implicit reminder that “we” also can take it away from you just as easily as we gave it. There is a long line of qualified Spidermen out there who won’t affect the bottom line in the box office… and there are a lot of humans who can wear the pilot hat and not crash the plane after a little training too. So… watch your step. We made you. We can break you.
The convergence of replaceability without risking safety and social roles of high status is happening everywhere around us and it is unleashing an obsession with low-stakes representation lever grabbing to address past injustices. But it is also arming a trigger happy public just waiting to yank you from your seat if you so much as whisper the wrong sentence with a casual reminder that no one will notice when you’re gone because the plane still lands safely in Orlando.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the social status of many of these roles will eventually fade. As technology turns more of us into glorified robo-sitters, the celebrity that used to exist will blur. But that is a slow process. The uniforms of pilots and superheroes have a strong legacy and a decent runway of glory to cash out. There is a window of genuine opportunity to responsibly nudge some representation levers for positive outcomes if we are careful.
There is a deeper conversation about creating different forms of celebrity that grow from the kinds of irreplaceability that is not threatened by technology. We all can be unique, honest, loving, intelligent citizens of healthy tribes. That kind of celebrity doesn’t stem from our irreplaceable skills and abilities that used to save and care for the lives of the community on planes and trains, but instead emerges from something much more intangible and important—our humanity.