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Don't you think the people who coined the term autopilot envisioned an eventual future when it was fully autonomous or "fully automatic?" It seems your major s
by blackguardx 10y ago
Don't you think the people who coined the term autopilot envisioned an eventual future when it was fully autonomous or "fully automatic?"
It seems your major sticking point is about the state of the art of autopilots in other fields.
- mikeash 10y agoI'm pretty doubtful that when Lawrence Sperry connected a gyroscope to a hydraulic control system in 1912 that he envisioned a future where the plane handled all aspects of flight. Ironically, Mr. Sperry apparently trusted his own device too much, as he crashed a plane after accidentally disengaging the autopilot in the midst of becoming possibly the first person to have sex while airborne. My sticking point is the state of the art of all autopilots in all fields. Fully autonomous systems are very new and still highly experimental (most drones still have human pilots, just remote, for example) and so I don't get how this popular conception that "autopilot = fully autonomous" happened. It's as if everyone thought that "boat" meant something with wheels that can drive on land.