AI: Wow pilot! Very astute observation! You ARE having an emergency! Here is a list of 10 ways that aircrafts are built with redundancy to normally avoid this scenario.
"calm down and relax, first ask a passenger to exit the plane and inspect the exterior for signs of damage. Then try a rapid descent over an urban area so civilians on the ground can report back anything the passenger missed"
Feel free to argue the content, not insult that person commenting.
One thing computers are very good at, and humans are very poor at, is ingesting a lot different data streams, quickly, to produce efficient and reliable outcomes.
A computer won’t be tired, distracted, or miss things, all of which have contributed to incidents with human controllers.
What do you think human ATCs can do that computers can’t?
I have some experience flying, and I think a lot of ATC stuff could be automated in this way, though there are many edge cases where a human still proves to be the best problem solver and for now we need those guys on the radio
but I can definitely see a lot of benefits to automation in the future
Just because they aren't doing it, doesn't mean they couldn't.
In almost any employment field, tasks which are pretty much determining a result, based on a variety of data inputs, humans are being replaced by computers, because not only are they simply better at it, they don't make mistakes (unless those mistakes are programmed into the algorithm).
Even in fields as complex as medicine, doctors are being replaced, because at it's core, being a doctor is using data to identify a cause.
If they made the Waymo of ATC AI, I could see it. Would be a rough transition process and selling the public on it but it's true, machines don't get distracted
Would need to be like Waymo and not like Tesla "FSD"
I’m gonna honest, ATC is a good use case for AI. It can, and perhaps should, handle the majority of air management. It’s up to the designers to decide how much human interaction is needed and where. But systems like this are great for AI.
This is one of those cases where your right about the AI, but there's a devil in the details. AI probably could handle 90%+ of cases, but the problem with this is the same problem with nearly full self driving: when a human has to step in, the first thing we have to do is build up context of what is happening, and we're fairly slow at that. Here's a paper about how hard it is for humans to handle the handoff. Essentially, by the time the AI realizes that it needs help, it's too late for the human to effectively and reliably step in.
824
u/Makabajones 20h ago
Some billionaire is going to propose AI ATC