What would the Jetsons do?

Do you remember the Jetsons? The fictional family living in the Future?

Remember the Jetsons?

I used to watch it back to back with the Flintsones when I was a kid… and although on paper the two shows were obviously entirely different (one was set in the stone ages and one had flying cars in it, for crying out loud) the experience of watching them was identical.

Each was centred around a family of four that got into silly situations that were resolved with no lasting impact by the end of the episode. Just like any and every successful sitcom. The stories were never memorable and, frankly, not why I watched the cartoons.

I loved the context. I loved the quirky backdrop visuals. I loved how the world around me had been reimagined in a really exaggerated way to create a vision of suburbia with very 20th century worries and artefacts (stone blenders and a small dinosaur where the garbage disposal sink would be… meanwhile I was living in a country that didn’t yet have those, so here I was learning about a marvel of futuristic convenience from a show theoretically set in 10,000 BC).

And the same applied to the Jetsons. The same suburban setting only with flying cars and Rosey the robot who was not top of the range because the family couldn’t afford better. She was only a mid range XB-500 model, if you recall. But ever so conscientious. Even though Jane Jetson was always a little disappointed she didn’t have a better one.

And the robot maid was as mad and futuristic as the flying cars and the aerobic classes over Zoom. Only… those happened.

The system to system to person connectivity that seemed intensely implausible… happened and happened fast.

George Jetson spoke to his boss on a screen and that seemed as far fetched and whacky as the cavemobiles in the Flintstones. And yet.

Here we are.

We may not have flying cars yet but we have ubiquitous system to system to human connectivity: from communication and entertainment to identity verification and realtime payments, we live in a Jetsons world and you may already be calling your Roomba vacuum cleaner Rosie.

And yet… there is one major thing the Flinstones had… and the Jetsons had… that we don’t have. Other than being fictional, I mean.

They lived in perfectly contained, unsurprising worlds.

The technological paradigm of their era was casually accepted and known – the stone wheels on cars powered by people’s own running feet was part of the joke… the self-driving, flying capsule the Jetsons casually zoomed around in was meant to be part of thing that made you go wow. And it did. And although we don’t have flying capsules for the masses quite yet, self driving cars are very much here. But we are not casual about it yet, like the Jetsons were.

They lived in the Future (capital F intentional, yes) but they acted like they know it was the present. They inhabited the future like they belonged there.

We have lived in a Jetson world for quite a long time now.

We have had system to system to person connectivity for rather a long time. From e commerce to video streaming and contactless payments to realtime loan processing. It’s there. We have it. I can call my mum on my watch and do a yoga class via Zoom. I can consult my doctor via an app and run portfolio reconciliations at the click of a button. Actually… not even that… as it’s an API call and you know… you don’t even need to click the button, Rosie has already done it for you, so to speak.

We have all those things the Jetsons had.

What we don’t have is their breezy comfort, the “this is where we live now” attitude about the technical capabilities of the Future that is actually the present.

And not just because your high street bank can’t work out a way for you to authenticate yourself on a new phone and you need to somehow get hold of a human in a call centre willing and able to help you (the willing part as problematic as the able part)… and not just because your employer who just spent another few hundred million on a bunch of new AI use cases has issued laptops that do MS Teams but not Zoom, Bluejeans but not Google Hangout. Not just because we are playing with ChatGPT on Monday and signing off continued use of on-premise systems on Tuesday.

But fundamentally because we – and by “we” I am actually referring to our entire industry, irrespective of geography or the age of the individuals involved – are still surprised that “change is the new normal”. We said it, but we meant that it would come to feel normal not that it would just be constant.

Surprise. It is constant. And it doesn’t feel normal.

I look around me and I see exhausted, worried people.

Decision-makers looking at an ever-growing list of things that need to be understood, prioritised and funded. Things that feel at odds with each other (AI budget over there… DORA compliance over here… BAU everywhere and here I am, stuck in the middle with you). Employees who are expected to navigate the world of the Jetsons with a set of tools that they borrowed from the Flintstones. And of course I generalise. But it is a general phenomenon.

We are firmly in the future but it doesn’t feel breezy, it doesn’t feel normal. It doesn’t feel oh-so-casual. And maybe it never will. It is changing too fast. Or rather new things are arriving too fast and old things are still here and nobody prepared us for navigating a landscape of such complexity: technologies spanning near a century, with different needs and capabilities, different fundamental world views and the only bridge between them… is you. You need to keep your brain tuned into all these uneven capabilities. You need to remember what quirks lurk in each part of your technical estate. You need to remain savvy towards both the past and the future.

It is exhausting.

And for as long as we carry on like we now are, it is inevitable.

As is progress. That is inevitable too. And as innovation, invention and technology adoption happen around us: in the wider economy irrespective of what we do (or what can afford inside our own organisations, sorry Jane, Rosie it is)… the part where new things come at us is also inevitable.

The part where we carry the old stuff forever… is not inevitable though. That part is a choice that we have historically made as an industry because of risk assessments and sunk costs, amortisation schedules and competing priorities.

And it is a choice we can make differently starting today.

We already live in the Future. It is here. It is the Present. It is fully formed and at times rather wonderful.

Let’s act like we know we belong here.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. 

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on X @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.