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And those decisions themselves could be easily automated, but people choose not to. There's a checklist for making those decisions. If you can write a checklist
by msellout 11y ago
And those decisions themselves could be easily automated, but people choose not to. There's a checklist for making those decisions. If you can write a checklist, you can write code. And for when there's not a checklist, then you can pick randomly, because that's what the human is essentially doing.
- acbabis 11y agoA human can notice when new evidence becomes relevant. If something isn't already on a computer's checklist when it becomes relevant, the human has a better chance of deciding what to do. EDIT: I understand that there is research going into making computers recognize "novel" situations. My comment only applies to algorithms that contain "checklists".
- msellout 11y agoNo, then you need to get meta. There's a checklist for identifying "novel" information and reacting. By checklist I mean algorithm. Sure, it can be tough to tease out the algorithm from the minds of current pilots. Luckily in aviation we already have training manuals. In other domains it'd be tougher to know when we're done extracting knowledge from humans.
- rimantas 11y agoHow close we are to the autopilot which would safely land a plane with engines off on the Hudson?
- peteretep 11y agoa) A human pilot who does combines exceptional luck with unusual skill b) Said human pilot was aided considerably by the airplane's autopilot system c) I'm not sure why you think software would find this particularly challenging?
- notahacker 11y agoIt's not the landing that's difficult, it's the "write an algorithm which correctly identifies which specific parameters should cause the aircraft to choose a river near the airport as its landing site, and get approval for it" that's the difficult part.
- dlitz 11y agoHow often does it happen, though? You don't need a human on every flight in order to deal with that. Build a few ground-based emergency remote-control centers across the continent, and train the autopilots (or the air traffic controllers) to call them when things get bad.
- notahacker 11y agoI'm not convinced anyone in the commercial aviation industry would agree with you. Some on-ground duty pilot sitting in a simulator who's suddenly placed in control of an aircraft that's notified an anomaly seconds before landing has absolutely zero chance of being able to make the same judgement call as a human (co)pilot who's been sitting at the controls for the last few hours. And the likelihood of human input being required is highly correlated with the possibility the aircraft has lost connectivity and/or some of the equipment that's supposed to be sending back data is malfunctioning (and yeah, you could build in more redundancy, but that still doesn't eliminate the problem and probably costs more than the pilot)
- omegaham 11y agoI agree in a sense, but one thing to keep in mind is that all automation requires a large investment, especially in systems that cannot fail. If the cost of that automation (programmers, testing, etc) is greater than the cost of training pilots, then pilots are going to remain. Usually, there ends up being a middle ground - you automate the low-hanging fruit, and leave the last percentage points to the humans.