My Flight To Italy Showed Me The Future Of Travel

ROME, Italy- Every lifetime, every generation, has its signature span of technologies — the machines, tools, and gadgets that define who they are and their time on the planet. The Clovis people had Clovis points, the ancient Polynesians had double haul canoes, the people of the Renaissance had the printing press, the Industrial Revolution had the steam engine, and we have mRNA vaccines (just kidding …).

Each generation experiences the great round of once ubiquitous technologies disappearing and novel technologies becoming ubiquitous … before giving way to another novel technology. With each technological cycle patterns of thought and worldview and the psycho-social matrix evolves and changes. Culture creates technology and technology creates culture.

And at the close of each lifetime we can look back on all of the things that we made, used, consumed, and say, wow, so I guess that was us.

My grandfather was born in the middle of the second decade of the 20th century, right on the cusp of the proliferation of the automobile. He watched as horse trails turned into paved roads which themselves gave way to super highways. He was born into a time before telephones were in homes, where radios were the trendy central entertainment piece of a household, and indoor plumbing was a luxury. He watched the advent and rise of commercial air travel, the television, the internet, and the cellphone. His world started as being made of paper, steel, and wood and ended with polymers, screens, and wires.

My first career was as an archaeologist, and archaeology is primarily the study of prehistoric art and technology. But I was for some reason oddly removed from applying the ephemeral nature of technologies past to those of my own era. I simply hadn’t lived long enough to watch the technologies of my time fade into obscurity and irrelevance.

But at 43 I’m now old enough. The awestruck looks of sheer discovery on my children’s faces when they found my old Walkman one year at my parents’ house was enough to let me know that I, like all humans before me, am advancing through a technological time span.

There is perhaps no better way to measure time than with things.

When I was born, most homes still had a record player. Then came the cassette player. Beta and VHS video machines blew our minds. The compact disk seemed space aged. Atari, then Nintendo, then Sega connected our brainwaves with the screen in a way that was never done before. Phones were something that had cords that connected to walls — you didn’t call a person, you called a house. I was of the first generation that had computers in school. Then when I was a teenager we started having computers in our homes, and this coupled with the advent of the internet.

I am of the last generation that had an analog childhood. We grew up without the internet, and right when we were coming of age so too was this technology that would disrupt everything that we knew before it.

In those days we connected to the internet via telephone lines with a hideous sounding noise of grinding electronic gears that’s ingrained in the consciousness of my generation … but nobody will ever hear again. We would browse the web, which meant waiting for full minutes for pages to load, just to be wowed by aerial shots of where we lived, photos of naked ladies, and instructions on how to blow things up. That’s what we did on the internet back then. Search engines at that time hardly even existed and didn’t function very well. To find anything you went to topical directories and websites interlinked with each other via things called web rings.

It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I got a smartphone. I was blogging then and I discovered that I could get something called a BlackBerry Tour with a global mobile data plan and then be able to blog from anywhere. I still remember the shock and disbelief that I felt the first time I blogged from a moving vehicle going down the highway in the middle of nowhere in Maine. Or, a little later on, when uploading posts from the jungles of Guatemala.

But none of this was as much of a shocking sign of things to come — or what my own technological time span would come to look like — than what I experienced last week on a flight from JFK to Rome:

The TSA ID check at security was done by AI.

The boarding process was done by AI.

The immigration process upon arrival in Rome was done by AI.

As I previously covered, the identification check at TSA security at JFK was done by tablets that snapped a picture of you and then, presumably, ran it through myriad databases to ensure you’re who you claim to be. You didn’t even need to flash a boarding pass. It knew who you were and what flight you were going on just by looking at you.

But it wasn’t until I began boarding the aircraft that the reality of the future of travel began taking hold. You didn’t need to flash a boarding pass to get on this plane. You didn’t even need to show your passport. All you needed to do was look into a screen and a gate would open allowing you access to the jet bridge. The only role the gate agents served was doing last minute seat assignments and making sure nobody was carrying too much luggage onto the plane. This was an international flight to another continent. I was on my way to Rome. All boarding and exit formalities were completed instantly simply by logging the biometrics of my face.

I thought that this would be the end of the Brave New World portion of this journey, but I was wrong. Upon arrival in Italy passengers were divided into three columns — EU citizens, travelers from an array of 15 or so approved countries, and everyone else. I travel on a US passport, so I was directed to the left for expedited entry, which meant that all I had to do was scan my passport and, yes, my face. I looked into the screen and the gate opened, shuttling me down a little alley that ended in what was once a standard immigration booth.

Inside that booth was a bored immigration agent who had no other purpose than to stamp passports. He was basically demoted to the status of human machine. He didn’t even look at the photos or previous travel history — you just handed your passport over to him open to a page with a blank space and he stamped it. If it wasn’t for the fact that physical passports are still in use, I wouldn’t have come face to face with an actual human in the process of entering the EU.

Like the TSA agents checking IDs and airline gate agents, immigration officials will soon become a thing of the past … as will the passports they stamp. All tier-1 immigration formalities will be conducted digitally via AI, there will be international databases on everyone, and we will be able to seamlessly walk right off a plane and into a foreign country … unless, that is, your face has been logged as being somewhere it shouldn’t have been.

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I am feeling nostalgic. We are entering an age where all things — especially travel — will be very different than they have ever been in human history. Privacy will become an outdated concept and where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going, what you look like, what you do, what you eat, what mandated snake oil you have taken (or have not taken), what you think, who you vote for, and your favorite brand of underwear will all be tracked and filed all the time, everywhere. We are only in the first stages of this process, and we are the last generation that will view this as something obtuse. Not long from now, this will all be as normal as having a social security number.

It is a little ironic that I comment on this and then share elements of my life openly on the internet. (Although blogs and the world wide web that allows access to them are also on the cusps of becoming as much relics as the walkman that so amazed my children.)

I miss the freedom that I had when I first began traveling. I’d go way out there into the jungles and into the mountains and literally nobody would know where I was. I’d call home when I could find that odd international public phone maybe once every three months. I’d send a weekly email to my parents from a greasy Internet cafe and ship out a postcard from each new country I’d enter. There was no efficient way to contact me. I couldn’t be called. I couldn’t be texted. I couldn’t receive a letter. I felt so free back then because I was.

I don’t know why this really matters. I don’t go around committing crimes. I don’t violate immigration policies. I enter countries how I’m supposed to and leave when my time is up. Why do I care if I’m tracked and monitored and videoed and biometrically catalogued? Why did I even bother trying to opt out of the facial scan at JFK? Who cares? It’s not like I particularly enjoy interacting with TSA agents, airline reps, and immigration officials anyway.

It’s because I know where this leads.

Not being able to board an aircraft because of something you wrote is on the docket. Not being able to travel internationally because of a pharmaceutical that you refused to inject is a coming reality. Being fined or having your account seized by payment apps for expressing wrong-think has actually been tried. Not having access to banking because you donated to or participated in a protest movement that your government didn’t like or because you don’t have a fixed address will no longer be relegated to the realms of science fiction.

You will walk up to the scanner, look into the camera, and a red bar will suddenly appear across the screen and that will be it. There won’t be an explanation. A case number will be beamed to your phone with a link to a chat bot help line that will tell you nothing.

They know how to make us fall in line simply by flipping off our ability to interact in our world. And our world is now digital, administered and patrolled not by trained men and women in uniform but by AI concocted by some egghead in Palo Alto.

The underclass of the future will be the heretics.

… Like it was in the good old days.