Sixty years in the past, the animated sequence The Jetsons completed its first and solely season earlier than being canceled.

Simply 24 episodes have been broadcast between September 1962 and March 1963. Regardless of this, the cartoon has achieved enormous affect in well-liked tradition, with numerous reruns, a reboot within the mid-Nineteen Eighties (51 episodes over two seasons), and a feature-length film in 1990.

The Jetsons was created by the Hanna-Barbara animation studio in Los Angeles as a futuristic model of the studio’s hit sequence The Flintstones, the primary cartoon sequence to achieve a prime-time slot.

However whereas The Flintstones was set in a distant, legendary stone age hundreds of years up to now, The Jetsons was set in a really close to future – in 2062.

Like The Flintstones, the present was aimed principally at youngsters and performed with concepts in regards to the future for laughs. It’s not a severe work of futurology. Even so, it’s nonetheless an fascinating cultural artefact, serving to us admire our current and our expectations of the long run.

The primary episode was broadcast just some weeks after US president John F. Kennedy gave his well-known “Moon speech,” promising “to go to the Moon on this decade and do the opposite issues, not as a result of they’re simple, however as a result of they’re arduous.”

The Jetsons’ title sequence.

Whereas that promise was motivated by fears of the Soviet Union profitable the House Race, the long run depicted is usually optimistic. Know-how holds the promise of a greater world.

Among the many whimsical know-how imagined are flying vehicles, robotic maids, video calls, smartwatches, meals printing and house tourism. A few of this appears far-sighted. However there are huge blind spots. These flying vehicles, for instance, nonetheless want a driver.

There are three issues its creators acquired obviously unsuitable: the place of girls within the workforce, how a lot we are going to work, and the place we work.

Gender stereotypes

Just like the Flintstones, The Jetsons revolves round a nuclear household in mid-Twentieth century industrialised society. There’s George (aged about 40), his spouse Jane (about 33), their teenage daughter Judy (15), youthful son Elroy, a canine named Astro, and a robotic maid.

We will calculate that Jane was nonetheless in her teenagers when she turned a mom. She’s the head of a recycling firm nevertheless it doesn’t appear to contain a lot work. For many half she’s typical TV homemaker.

That is now the norm in solely a small variety of societies. It appears unlikely the pattern in ladies’s workforce participation will reverse within the subsequent 40 years.

Ladies in workforce

Had the present been made a decade later it’s attainable the affect of the ladies’s liberation motion and books comparable to Germain Greer’s The Feminine Eunuch (revealed in 1970) would have altered this imaginative and prescient of 2062.

Within the 1990 film, for instance, Jane is an environmental activist. In a 2017 relaunched comedian she is a scientist engaged on the Worldwide House Station.

Working hours

One rationalization as to why Jane doesn’t work is that George, the breadwinner, barely has to work both.

He goes to work simply two days every week, for one hour a day, as a “digital index operator”. This entails him pushing buttons to keep up an atomic supercomputer named RUDI (brief for “Referential Common Digital Indexer”).

George’s working hours replicate the optimism of the Nineteen Sixties that positive aspects made by employees within the first half of the Twentieth century – with a 40-hour, five-day workweek changing into the norm by the Fifties – would proceed within the second half of the century. Optimists hoped productiveness positive aspects from automation would imply a “leisure society” by the yr 2000.

George Jetson at work. Hanna-Barbera

This has not proved the case, with solely marginal reductions in working hours for many since then.

As US economist and sociologist Juliet Schor famous in her 1991 e book The Overworked American: The Surprising Decline of Leisure, the thought know-how alone can result in working much less fails to account for the financial system through which work is finished. That’s, capitalism is geared in direction of growing consumption (and thereby earnings). The emphasis has due to this fact been on making more cash as the important thing to happiness, and due to this fact working even more durable, not much less.

We will see this even within the present four-day week motion, which guarantees the prospect of slicing the 38-hour, five-day workweek to 32 hours and 4 days, however solely as long as the identical productiveness is maintained.

Trials of this 100:80:100 mannequin (100% of the pay, 80% of the hours, 100% of the productiveness) have been heralded an amazing success, however as work researcher Anthony Veal has famous, huge questions stay as as to if these outcomes are relevant throughout the economic system.

At this stage, the probability of serious discount in working hours for most individuals over the following 40 years appears to be like doubtful.

Distant work

Regardless that George solely has to work two hours every week, he nonetheless has to go to an workplace (at Spacely House Sprockets) to push his buttons.

This will likely replicate the actual fact the web and the non-public computing revolution have been but to happen. Futurologists didn’t begin enthusing in regards to the prospects of distant working till the Nineteen Seventies.

Extra importantly, that’s simply how issues have been conceived – work was one thing carried out below the watchful eye of administration. It additionally created alternatives to play with acquainted motifs involving George’s boss, the short-tempered Mr Spacely, a personality just like Fred Flintstone’s boss, Mr Slate, and Mr Burns in The Simpsons.

Administration resistance to distant work was sturdy up till the COVID-19 pandemic pressured a cultural shift.

The way forward for the place and the way a lot we work will little doubt be formed by know-how. However our perceptions and expectations about what might be achieved are simply as necessary.