buck rogers in the 25th century

One of my first cinema memories is Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, back in 1979.

The premise: a NASA pilot launched in 1987 gets frozen in deep space and wakes up 500 years later. In the future he lands in, starfighters fly themselves. Combat computers do the work. Pilots watch screens.

Then Buck switches off the computer and flies manually… and out-flies everyone.

He learnt to fly when there was no other way. The future made his skill obsolete. It stayed valuable anyway.

I usually joke with friends about this. Whenever the conversation turns to AI and what it's doing to how we work and learn, I bring up Buck Rogers, the man who could still fly the ship manually.

I wrote my first two undergraduate theses without the internet. My doctoral thesis without AI. I learnt guitar in the late 80s, when a tutorial meant rewinding a cassette for the fortieth time. And I sold health insurance door to door in the streets of Montevideo, facing rejection eye to eye, one doorbell at a time.

Slow, inefficient, often frustrating. But it built a muscle: sitting with a hard problem when there's no shortcut. Building judgement from friction. Knowing what "good" looks like because you assembled it yourself, piece by piece.

I don’t think the answer is to romanticise difficulty. Every generation builds its own muscles, on its own terrain. The next one will master tools, behaviours and skills that I probably cannot even imagine. And this new world is full of opportunity for those who seize it.

But something has changed. In Buck's future, flying was automated. In ours, effort is. 

Deciding where your time, focus and energy go… nobody can automate that for you.

That's the manual flying now.