We Learnt to Fly. Did We Learn to Become Human?

The aeroplane conquered one of humanity’s oldest limitations. What happened afterwards tells us something uncomfortable about progress.

There is something faintly ridiculous about watching an irritated passenger at an airport complain that the Wi-Fi is slow. Not because the complaint is unreasonable; if you have paid for connectivity, you are entitled to expect it. What is ridiculous is the setting. Here is a human being about to enter a machine weighing several hundred tonnes, rise kilometres above the earth, travel through the sky at a speed our ancestors would have attributed to gods, cross distances that once consumed months of a lifetime, perhaps eat a hot meal somewhere above the clouds, land on another continent and video-call home before collecting his luggage — and somewhere in this sequence of miracles, the inconvenience that occupies him is that an email attachment is taking twelve seconds to download.

Perhaps this is one of the stranger characteristics of our species: we do not merely invent miracles; we eventually become bored by them. The extraordinary has a surprisingly short shelf life. A child at an aircraft window still understands this better than most adults. She presses her face against the glass as buildings shrink into toys and clouds appear beneath her feet. The adult beside her pulls down the shade and opens a spreadsheet. Neither response is wrong. But somewhere between childhood and adulthood, wonder has been converted into utility.

For most of human history, the sky was not infrastructure. It was mystery. Gods inhabited it. Heaven was imagined somewhere above us. Our mythologies filled it with flying chariots, winged beings and celestial journeys because human beings could look upward but could not go there. Flight represented freedom precisely because gravity appeared non-negotiable. Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a fragile contraption of timber, fabric and wire left the ground for a few seconds, and one of humanity’s oldest impossibilities quietly became an engineering problem.

What happened next is almost difficult to comprehend because we now know the ending. The aeroplane did not remain an aeroplane. It altered commerce, migration, tourism, diplomacy, warfare, medicine, family, geography and eventually our perception of distance itself. Places that had belonged to separate worlds entered one another’s daily lives. A person could breakfast in Mumbai and sleep in London. A parent could watch a child leave for another continent without necessarily believing the separation was permanent. Medicines, organs, food, executives, tourists, refugees, soldiers and ideas began travelling at speeds that changed what societies considered near and far.

Then came the darker achievement. Human beings discovered that if a machine could carry a person through the sky, it could also carry a weapon.

Within decades of learning to fly, we had learnt to bomb cities from above. Eventually, aircraft would deliver weapons capable of erasing much of a city in moments. The sky that had occupied our oldest dreams of transcendence became another theatre of war. The machine had not betrayed us. It had simply obeyed us.

That distinction matters.

The aeroplane did not reveal what technology could become. It revealed what human beings already were.

We tend to describe technological history as though it were synonymous with human progress. Electricity, automobiles, aviation, antibiotics, television, nuclear physics, computers, the internet, smartphones and artificial intelligence appear on an ascending timeline, each new achievement standing on the shoulders of the previous one. The graph rises, therefore civilisation must be rising with it. Yet capability and civilisation are not quite the same thing. A society may become extraordinarily sophisticated at manipulating the physical world while remaining surprisingly primitive in its handling of fear, power, envy, belonging and difference.

An aeroplane is morally empty. It can carry soldiers towards a battlefield or negotiators towards a peace conference. It can drop bombs or deliver emergency supplies. It can evacuate civilians from a disaster zone, carry a heart for transplantation, reunite a grandmother with grandchildren she has not seen in years, transport a dictator, rescue a hostage, take newlyweds on their honeymoon or carry a migrant home to attend his father’s funeral. The machine does not know the difference.

Technology has no conscience. It borrows ours.

And perhaps this is the uncomfortable idea hiding inside the history of almost every important invention. Human beings have become astonishingly good at solving the problem of can we? We are less consistent with the question that arrives afterwards: now that we can, what should we do with it?

Consider what flight actually conquered: distance. Geography had governed human possibility for millennia. Oceans separated civilisations. Mountains isolated communities. The place where you were born determined most of the people you would ever meet and many of the ideas you would ever encounter. To travel great distances required money, danger and time. Aviation compressed geography until the phrase “the other side of the world” ceased to mean what it once did.

Yet an odd thing happened as physical distance collapsed.

Human distance survived.

We learnt to cross oceans without necessarily learning to cross differences. We became capable of travelling from Delhi to New York in less than a day while carrying prejudices that had travelled intact through generations. We connected economies while remaining divided by religion, nationality, race, class and ideology. We became neighbours geographically without always becoming neighbours psychologically.

Perhaps geography was never the greatest distance between human beings.

This is where the aeroplane stops being the real subject of the story.

The pattern repeats too neatly to ignore. Nuclear physics illuminated the structure of matter and gave humanity both energy and weapons of unimaginable destruction. Television allowed millions to witness the same events and eventually taught industries that outrage could be monetised. The internet placed an extraordinary proportion of human knowledge within reach of ordinary people while giving misinformation the fastest distribution system it had ever possessed. Social media promised connection and delivered something far more complicated: friendships across continents, reunited classmates and democratic access to audiences alongside comparison, performance, tribalism, loneliness and addiction. The smartphone placed a camera, library, newspaper, bank, office, marketplace, television studio, map and communication network into one hand, and then produced the peculiar modern dinner table at which four people can sit physically together while each is mentally elsewhere.

None of this makes technology evil. That conclusion would be intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. Technology has liberated human beings from enormous amounts of suffering. Modern medicine has turned once-fatal illnesses into manageable conditions. Communication technology allows migrant parents to watch their children grow in real time. Aviation moves medical teams and relief material after disasters. The internet has democratised access to knowledge on a scale previous generations could scarcely imagine. A romantic longing for a supposedly simpler past usually depends on forgetting how difficult, unequal and medically precarious much of that past actually was.

The contradiction is precisely the point.

Technology does not necessarily improve or diminish humanity. It amplifies humanity. It gives generosity greater reach and cruelty greater efficiency. It allows knowledge to travel faster and stupidity to travel at exactly the same speed. It expands the radius of compassion while simultaneously enlarging the possible radius of harm.

Which is why our present fascination with artificial intelligence may be asking the wrong question.

We are understandably preoccupied with how intelligent machines will become. Can they reason? Can they create? Which professions will change? Will machines eventually exceed human capability? What happens when artificial intelligence can perform tasks that once required years of education? These are serious questions, and some will define the economic and political landscape of the coming decades.

But history suggests another question that is quieter and perhaps more consequential.

What happens when enormous capability is placed in the hands of a species whose wisdom has not increased at the same speed?

That is not primarily a question about artificial intelligence. It is a question about human intelligence.

We worry about machines becoming too much like us while rarely considering whether we have become sufficiently wise for the machines we are creating. The danger of powerful technology is not necessarily that it will develop human flaws. It may simply become extraordinarily effective at executing human intentions.

The aeroplane was an early lesson in this. Once we could fly, our goodness could fly and our cruelty could fly. Our curiosity flew. Our commerce flew. Our compassion flew. Our wars flew too. The machine increased the radius within which human intention could operate.

AI may do something similar, except the radius may no longer be geographical. It may amplify thought itself: persuasion, creation, analysis, deception, discovery, manipulation, education, diagnosis, invention. The distance being conquered this time is not between Mumbai and London. It is the distance between an intention and its execution.

And that changes the moral arithmetic considerably.

Earlier generations often had time between invention and consequence. Today, technologies can reach hundreds of millions of people before societies have fully understood what they are doing to us. We build first, distribute second, monetise third and begin discussing psychological and social consequences somewhere around the fourth stage. Human beings have created a civilisation in which our inventions can mature faster than our conversations about them.

Our machines are growing up faster than their parents.

This may be the central challenge of the century ahead. We have spent enormous intellectual energy learning how to make technology more capable. We may eventually have to devote equal seriousness to making the people controlling that capability more discerning. Not more intelligent; intelligence has never been our shortage. Human beings who built concentration camps were intelligent. Human beings who developed biological weapons were intelligent. Human beings who manipulate markets, elections and vulnerable people can be exceptionally intelligent.

Wisdom is a different faculty.

Intelligence asks how.

Wisdom lingers over why.

Intelligence wants to know whether a boundary can be crossed. Wisdom wonders what exists on the other side and whether crossing it changes something we cannot easily restore.

This is not an argument for technological hesitation masquerading as philosophy. Civilisation cannot retreat into nostalgia every time invention unsettles us. The history of humanity is partly the history of refusing limitations, and much that is beautiful about modern life exists because somebody refused to accept that something was impossible. The problem begins only when we assume that the removal of a limitation automatically represents advancement.

There are limitations worth defeating. Disease. Distance. Ignorance. Hunger. Physical incapacity.

There may also be limits worth understanding before we destroy them.

Human attention may have limits for a reason. Privacy may have value beyond inconvenience. Friction occasionally protects us from impulse. Forgetting may be psychologically necessary. Not everything that can be accelerated benefits from acceleration. Not every human interaction improves when it becomes more efficient.

Perhaps the mature stage of civilisation begins when a species stops measuring progress solely by what it has become capable of doing.

That would require an unusual kind of humility from us because our technological achievements are intoxicating. In barely more than a century, human beings went from tentative powered flight to walking on the Moon. We split the atom. Sequenced the human genome. Connected billions of people through invisible networks. Built machines capable of producing language, images and reasoning that would have looked like sorcery to people alive surprisingly recently.

And yet our oldest difficulties remain embarrassingly familiar. We still envy. We still fear outsiders. We still confuse wealth with worth and dominance with strength. We still damage relationships because being right feels temporarily more satisfying than being kind. We still wage wars over territory, identity and power. We still discover, usually too late, that time with the people we love was more finite than it appeared.

There is something almost comic about a species planning settlements on Mars while remaining capable of turning a family WhatsApp group into a geopolitical crisis.

Maybe intelligence was never the final frontier.

Humanity has always been more comfortable conquering the external world than examining the internal one. Oceans could be crossed. Mountains could be climbed. Gravity could be defeated. Atoms could be split. Space could be entered. Machines could be taught to think.

But jealousy, greed, fear, loneliness, tribalism and the hunger for power cannot be engineered away quite so easily.

They board the aircraft with us.

Perhaps that is why the image of a child at an aeroplane window remains so compelling. Somewhere at 35,000 feet, she looks down at the earth with the astonishment adults have trained themselves to lose. From that height, many of the things human beings consider enormously important become invisible. There are no borders drawn across the ground. Religions are not marked in different colours. Nations do not announce themselves. The arguments, hierarchies and identities for which people are sometimes willing to kill one another cannot be seen at all.

There is only land, water, cloud and the faint evidence of human settlement.

The adults around her may be sleeping, working, watching films or waiting impatiently for the aircraft to land. For them, flight has become transportation.

For her, perhaps for a few more years, it is still impossible.

And maybe that is worth remembering.

A little over a century ago, we solved one of humanity’s oldest impossibilities. We taught ourselves to leave the earth, cross oceans and make distance surrender.

The next impossible distance may prove considerably harder.

It is the distance between everything human beings have learnt to do and everything we have yet to learn about being human.

About the Author

Dr. Sheetal Nair is a psychotherapist, executive coach, author, entrepreneur and educator whose work explores human behaviour, leadership, relationships, mental well-being and contemporary life. His writing is particularly interested in the contradictions that emerge when human psychology encounters changing societies, technologies, ambitions and relationships.

He writes about the mind, relationships, work, ageing, ambition, and the wonderfully complicated business of being human.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.