An interesting programme, but as ususal spoiled by a tendency towards sensationalism. I hope it is a series, no mention thus far of TCAS, or standard levels, wouldn't do to suggest there is any hope, would it?
As for the datalink, I think it would be the way to go eventually, but the prog. did make a valid point in saying about standardisation being a problem because whichever system is adopted, there is a lot of money to be made!
Situational awareness could be addressed using a display similar to JTIDS that the military have, but there will obviously be a tendancy for some pilots to become amateur ATCOs and argue about their clearances (some do it already with TCAS!).
In the short term, with respect to language problems, the most important thing, whichever language we adopt, is to use standard phraseology. The american ATC is particularly bad for this, probably because most of their traffic speaks English (sort of) as their mother tongue, so they get away with it. As for the French, I believe this is forced upon them by government, they have a whole ministry devoted to protection of the French Language, which issues quotas to french commercial radio dictating how much french language music they must play, and they want to ban the expression "le weekend" (can't say I blame them). As English is my language, I would obviously like it to be the ICAO standard, but it is the most widely spoken, and I guess Spanish would be the next logical choice, but trying to get everyone to learn 5 languages? Not likely.
As for removing humans from ATC, I'd much rather have an ATCO to talk to than a computer. I doubt anyone would board an aeroplane without human flight crew and I wouldn't want to operate an aeroplane in an ATC environment run by a product of Bill Gates' pension fund.
MSG: You have pop-up traffic, type and destination unknown, same height, converging heading, range 0.25 mile, standby while windows calculates a new heading.....