Yossarian wrote:

LesterUnlimited wrote:

Who has a job that potentially could be threatened by cheap robot labour?

Most of us if and when we nail AI.

IanHamlett wrote:

There's that and the thought of them being hacked.

Childintime wrote:

I'm opposed because I don't trust companies to protect the interests of people over governments and their own interests.

Elmlea wrote:

I'm still not sure where you're going with that, dyna. Which do you think is actually more complex, and what's your point?

Having flown transatlantically and on long distances before, I still maintain that the biggest difference is the complexity of any change of circumstance. No matter what, an automatic car can always "just stop." 

An aircraft may have a huge selection of different parameters in an emergency; proximity of airfields, runway lengths, weather en route, weather at the airfield, stopping aids (runway barriers, arrester cables), fire category and support, fuel available, engineering help, approach aids (ILS, radar, etc). The right answer is never "just go to the nearest airfield." 

Where I am when it happens also changes the reactions. If I'm at 2000ft and hit a bird, and worry about the engines, do I *always* just pull up? What if there's airspace above me? Do I set the transponder to emergency and go into the airspace anyway? Do I elect to stay under it because it's a busy approach lane? Does the weather affect this decision? Does the terrain affect it? Does the amount of fuel remaining?

You need a pilot to make these decisions. You can't just have one who jumps into a remote cockpit for the last 10 minutes to handle the landing; when you're making these decisions, you need all of the granular information that you've accrued across the whole flight. You need to know where you are, see the traffic patterns, watch the weather develop and change, and have the time to think about it. 

As I fly, I keep thinking "what if" throughout, and I've been trained to think clearly about an emergency based on all the information I've got at the time of hitting a bird. If it takes out the canopy and I can't see, I can refer to other instruments. If it damages the air data system, I can always just look out of the window and work it out with sound and feel. I don't understand at all how you engineer a computer to do all that, nor how you put in enough redundancy that it know which system is broken after an incident.

You look at the parameters and you make a decision using your own airmanship skills.

In the short history of airline safety, the great turning point occurred in the 1950s with the introduction of jet airplanes, which were far more reliable and easy to fly than the complex piston-engine behemoths that preceded them. Over the next two decades, as the global jet fleet grew, whole categories of accidents related to mechanical failures and weather were largely engineered away. The safety improvement was dramatic. It opened the way to airline travel as we know it today.

But by the 1970s, a new reality had come into view. Though the accident rate had been reduced, the accidents that continued to occur were being caused almost entirely by pilots—the very people, many of them still at the controls, who had earned a nearly heroic reputation for having stood in the way of the mechanical or weather-related failures of the past. Pilot error had long been a recognized problem, but after the advent of jets it was as if an onion had been peeled to reveal an unexpectedly imperfect core. The problem was global. In Europe and the United States, a small number of specialists began to focus on the question. They were researchers, regulators, accident investigators, test pilots, and engineers. The timing was unfortunate for line pilots, who had begun to fight a futile rear-guard action, ongoing today, against an inexorable rollback in salaries and status. The rollback was a consequence of the very improvements in technology that had made the airlines safer. Simply put, for airline pilots the glory days were numbered, and however unfortunate that was for them, for passengers it has turned out to be a good thing.

Funkstain wrote:

So you've posted the same thing. Again. Elm's point is clear: yes pilot error is the main reason for crashes. No, automating at this point would not reduce the number of crashes, simply because the systems do not (yet!) exist to adequately compensate for what can go wrong (with systems, monitors, responses to inputs, decision-making, etc) with that automation and during take-off, flight, and landing. You see? The two points are not relevant to each other. This is why Elm is confused. We all know pilot error is the thing, but we also are stating that right now there is no viable alternative.

Funkstain wrote:

I do not know why I enjoy (temporarily) arguing with Dyno so much. It's like prodding a kitten so that it nips me back.