Many moons ago, for a short while, I lived in Las Vegas,, the tackiest, but strangely seductive city in America. Sometimes known as Sin City. My husband was flying for one those companies, which flew tourists out and over the Grand Canyon, in a small plane. Until one day, he came home and announced that he had quit. “It’s much too dangerous” he told us…”it’s a single engined plane and we have to fly below the rim, if the engine fails, that’s it, nowhere to land. My husband was a very good pilot, he had once landed a Twin Beech, not a small airplane- a tail-dragger as it was called, on a beach in Mexico, when suddenly both engines failed, due to a fuel supply issue, with little warning. So understandably he took safety seriously.
How times have changed, as technology rules and as far as I am aware all modern planes are a lot computer flown. The human influence is still critical, but the skills needed now, are so much more complex, You not only have to know how to actually operate a airplane, fly it, but be computer expert as well.
Computers, technology brings me back to the film we currently have in production, about AI Humanoid Robots in the Care Industry. We have a Western world with an ever growing, aging population and fewer and fewer people to take care of them. Humanoids may well be the answer, but will we all have to be tech experts to live with them? Or will they take on human characteristics to the extent that we won’t need to? And who, eventually be in charge? The film ANDY, poses the question; we don’t have the answer.
So back to Vegas – I was last there about 20 odd years ago on a visit. It was still expansive, brash, glamorous?. It is a strange anonymous place with people drifting in and out of life, losing their money ( the ‘house’ always wins), getting married. The apartments we lived in housed croupiers, employees needing in the gambling world, moving between Las Vegas and Atlantic City, the only two cities then licensed for people to gamble. For the land of the free, the US has some surprisingly restrictive laws, State and Federal.
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