I’ve noticed two schools of thought when it comes to fantasy spaceship operations.
- Tons of people
- Tons of automation
On one hand… Who WERE all those people that Jean-Luc passed on the corridor? What were all those soldiers (meant to be) doing that got vented into space when a ship got destroyed on Battlestar Gallactica?
On the other hand… the only reason why there were ANY people on the ship featured in Passengers was because they were going to colonize another planet. They were meant to sleep the entire way. For decades (or like in Mass Effect, for hundreds of years). In some writer’s imaginations, the ship’s Artificial Intelligence system and bots can handle the entire operation.
The automation route is interesting… I’ll talk about that more later. Today, however, I’m on the side of people.
I’d like to put forward the idea that all those people gathered on deck cheering Ender were *actually* from the IT Department.
Delivering enterprise experiences is amazingly complex and there are a LOT of people involved. The person that shows up to help you when your computer craps out, is just the tip of the spear. Behind her is an entire department of support staff that is responsible for helping out with laptop, desktop, software, login, and phone system problems for everyone in your company. Depending on how big your company is, there’s usually another group of people responsible for designing how those end user systems are configured. If your company has an internal website (that includes HR stuff, anything with a form on it, or other internal tools that connect to the inter or intranet), there are a couple of people working on that. If y’all actually produce web-based things for sale, there are a few TEAMS for that. Once all those teams exist, of course you need centralized infrastructure management, networking, process, and security (and compliance) teams. Of course, then you need people to design interfaces for those systems and manage the complexity of the complexity. Even if you work at a smaller business with a small IT team, they probably pay other companies for these services and systems — so they exist somewhere. Yeah. The sheer number of roles involved in making your average business tick is nontrivial.
Can you imagine being 3 light years out from earth with a processor failure that impacts your AI? Sure, you can train one of your 3 astronauts to swap out a board after they wake up from cryo-sleep, but what happens when that failure triggers a write error which propagates to corrupt a backup database which then takes down your propulsion system, your lighting system, and makes your AI start omitting every third word when it speaks because for some reason they all reference the same corrupt data (…don’t ask, I just made that last part up but stranger things have happened)??
That’s right. In the future, all those people on those spaceships will work in IT. And, ironically, they’ll be working to automate all the things.