![People wait near check-in desks during the chaos at Gatwick Airport last week](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/health-fitness/2023/09/01/TELEMMGLPICT000347155153_16935814416580_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq9FyvhwCnHcMhHALs2CEh5V5NUcTKNHKqy85KLqtvPLE.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![People wait near check-in desks during the chaos at Gatwick Airport last week](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/health-fitness/2023/09/01/TELEMMGLPICT000347155153_16935814416580_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq9FyvhwCnHcMhHALs2CEh5V5NUcTKNHKqy85KLqtvPLE.jpeg?imwidth=680)
By the easyJet check in desk, I sat down and wept. Or at the very least, I felt like sitting down and weeping – unfortunately, most of the floor space of Gatwick airport last Monday was taken up with suitcases and buggies and people in various stages of realising that instead of flying to Barcelona or Milan or Berlin, they were going nowhere, very, very slowly.
It is a week since the great Air Traffic Control fiasco of 2023, which was a very British kind of crisis. It was the Fawlty Towers of international crises, if you will. “It must be hackers!” came the cry from the queue for bag drop. The woman who was on her way to Majorca for a week at an all-inclusive was more specific. “I’ve only got one word right now,” she announced conspiratorially. “And that word is Russia.”
The rest of the queue murmured in … agreement? Boredom? By this point we had been there for almost four hours, and we were running out of snacks. And hope. A long night at Gatwick’s South Terminal stretched ahead of us. If we were part of an attack on democracy, that might at least make up for missing out on aqua-aerobics and the all-you-can-eat buffet. But no. Turns out the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) most likely failed because someone put in a message that the system didn’t understand. So there you have it: tens of thousands of people stranded, £100 million up the swanny, and all because the computer said “no”.
Once we had reached the family event we were travelling to in Majorca – a day and quite a bit of money in new flights later – we met people who had been told they wouldn’t be able to get back to the UK until today at the earliest. That was no good for Sophie, whose daughter was starting secondary school this morning, so she ended up spending £2,000 on some flights via Stuttgart. It was also not an option for Mark, whose boss needed him back at his desk in Manchester so badly that she had stumped up for flights back via Reykjavik, where he and his family would enjoy an eight-hour stopover in the airport.
As I listened to their stories, I felt both very, very lucky, and very, very terrified by how over-reliant we have become on technology. A computer system goes down for no more than three hours, and a week later we are still feeling the effects. Advances in technology are so numerous that we take for granted the ability to fly off around the globe at a moment’s notice.
But the collapse of Nats is a good reminder that this winter, it is only 120 years since the Wright Brothers first got a plane in the sky. In the grand scheme of human evolution, we are not that far away from steamships and telegrams. It’s only in the past few decades that technology has transformed the world beyond recognition. And yet, as the Nats failure shows, these transformations are an illusion. Take away our digital props, and we are basically cavemen.
How else have computers and technology actually caused us to regress as a species? Stuck in Gatwick South, I came up with a few…
Map reading has become a rare skill, like cheese-rolling or bog-snorkelling
I still remember the Geography teacher who made us learn every single symbol on an Ordnance Survey map, from the sign for a disused lighthouse to the one for a gravel pit. “One day, it could SAVE YOUR LIFE!” he bellowed at us, as we sat shaking in terror about what we perceived to be the very real possibility of stumbling into a quarry or a slag heap. I attempted to explain this to my daughter the other day, who stopped me by the time I had got to the phrase “current or former place of worship”.
“Mum, were you born in 1852 or something?” she said, with a roll of her eyes. “You wouldn’t have had to learn this stuff if you’d just invented Waze.”
There’s no such thing as handwriting
I didn’t invent Waze because I spent my teenage years obsessively perfecting my signature, in a way I thought denoted glamour and sophistication. Almost 30 years later, the Notes app on my phone has ensured I have the handwriting of a five-year-old, while my signature has become nothing more than an illegible squiggle on a handheld screen.
I have no idea of my husband’s phone number
In an emergency, without my smartphone, who would I call? The landline of the childhood home I haven’t lived in since 1997? The speaking clock? These are the only numbers I know off by heart, so reliant am I on the memory of my iPhone. Take that away, and I may as well be suffering from amnesia, for all the use my actual brain is.
I am completely unable to just go with the flow
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, you had to just accept that things wouldn’t always go your way. Your friend might be late because the trains weren’t working and you’d just have to wait at the station for three hours until they turned up. Or you would make a plan to go to Brighton beach for the day, without any knowledge of what the weather was going to be like because you’d missed the Nine O’Clock News the night before. You would have no idea what was going on in the world, unless you bought a newspaper. Now, we are incapable of beginning a day without first checking four different weather apps and Kim Kardashian’s relationship status.
We’ve forgotten how to talk to people
I don’t know about you, but when someone phones me, I am instantly sent into a state of terror. Why can’t they just text? Something must be dreadfully wrong!
It’s this gradual loss of human contact that really struck me as I stood in Gatwick airport. None of the easyJet staff knew what was going on, because their computers hadn’t been updated. If we wanted information, we should keep checking the website. If our flight was cancelled, we would need to rebook another one via the app.
Everyone was left to their own devices, quite literally. As we eventually gave up and left, I noticed a pregnant woman, with a toddler perched on her hip, standing by a bag drop sign. She had tears in her eyes as she jabbed pointlessly at her phone.
“Are you OK?” I interjected. “Can I help in any way?” A hint of a smile began to spread on her face. “You just have helped, simply by checking on me,” she said. It wasn’t a flight to Majorca, or a promise of being put up in a hotel overnight by an airline. But in this curiously disconnected world, it was something even better than that: two people acknowledging that, sometimes, all the technology in the world doesn’t make up for simple, warm, human interaction.
Our over-reliance on technology is causing us to regress as a species
The recent airport chaos shows that without our digital props, we are basically cavemen