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I love this sort of thing in theory, but I would never trust my life to an electronic helicopter pilot. I believe the tech can be made to be safe and reliable

I love this sort of thing in theory, but I would never trust my life to an electronic helicopter pilot. I believe the tech can be made to be safe and reliable during normal flight. However, all the edge cases here are potentially fatal. How well can we train a computer to choose a safe emergency landing spot and auto-rotate down if the engine fails? How will it cope with avionics/electrical failures? Or a geomagnetic storm? How well will the system be hardened against malicious attacks? How well can we endow it with the judgment to avoid icing at low temperatures? The answer to most of these questions might well be “pretty darn well, actually;” however, emergencies happen, and in those situations, I— and, I suspect, many others— will only ever feel safe with an experienced, context-aware, human pilot at the controls. (Unless we somehow crack general AI...)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
allthenews 8y ago
Well, probably by training the net under such conditions. Actually I see no reason that, with a sufficiently large and accurate dataset, a neural net can't be trained to pick out a "safe[enough]" emergency landing spot. And, a well trained net should be able to fly in any condition, including limited avionics, better than a human. You might ask where this data will be coming from. I suspect 3D physics simulations are accurate enough that they could be used to generate data. Particularly if optimized for the physics behind helicopter handling.
rmason 8y ago
Right now if you take an ordinary ambulance and let it enter one of Elon Musk's Boring Company tunnels and speed towards the hospital at 150 mph with no time outs for traffic that would be a large enough advance for most people with way less risk. Sometimes one new "good enough" technology overtakes a sexier one.
- skybrian 8y ago
  That's not "right now", that's another future possibility. No such tunnel exists.
tlb 8y ago
Would a sufficiently good track record convince you? Say, a million flights with 80% lower accident rates than human pilots? A strict utilitarian should only care about accident rates. But as Greene [0] and others show, most people don't make moral judgements in a strictly utilitarian way. Thus, we judge homicide as worse than choosing not to save someone from death, even though in both cases someone dies as a result of a decision. One of the lessons from probing moral calculus is that nobody can really articulate reasons for their actual moral decisions. People can articulate utilitarianism, but not what people actually do. But, if you can articulate why you might prefer a human pilot over an autopilot, even given sufficient statistics that the autopilot is safer, it'd be interesting to hear. [0] http://www.joshua-greene.net/ http://www.joshua-greene.net/
- benmowa 8y ago
  what about the one-in-a-million events that pilots continuously train for? Is one million flights a large enough sample?
  - tlb 8y ago
    The current helicopter accident rate for emergency medical service is 3.9 / 100,000 flight hours [0], so a million flights is probably large enough. But feel free to answer the question based on some larger number that would convince you it's statistically safer. [0] https://www.aea.net/events/rotorcraft/files/US_Rotorcraft_Accident_Data_And_Statistics.pdf https://www.aea.net/events/rotorcraft/files/US_Rotorcraft_Ac...
- oliveshell 8y ago
  I think I could be convinced, eventually— but it would take quite a lot of evidence. A consistently lower accident rate than human pilots would be a good start, but it would be even better if those flights were conducted in the most punishing weather conditions possible and in all sorts of dangerous scenarios where pilot error is likely. One of the biggest factors is that it is terrifying to imagine falling out of the sky in an aircraft under the command of a software-based pilot with which I cannot communicate and that I cannot see doing everything it possibly can to avert disaster. It may not be a rational fear, but we humans are not rational creatures. It’s an issue of trust, which the folks interviewed in the article do acknowledge, to their credit. We can instinctively judge whether or not to trust another human being, because we have a lifetime of practice interacting with them. The burden of proof of safety for an uncommunicative mechanical system is much higher, and lots of testing (that I can observe on video) will go some way towards to building that trust. Furthermore, things like avoiding thunderstorms, the motion of which we still cannot predict with computers (turbulence being an unsolved problem in physics), could be very tricky for an automated system to handle. As autonomous technology progresses and we accumulate data, I might begin to feel differently. But for right now, without knowing all of the details of the system, I have no way of knowing how it is reasoning and perceiving the situation (I’m very familiar with the human consciousness, as I possess one myself) and this leads to a fundamental sort of uneasiness in my lizard brain. I’m still bullish on technology, though, and this is an area in which I would be enthusiastic to be proven wrong.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

allthenews 8y ago

Well, probably by training the net under such conditions. Actually I see no reason that, with a sufficiently large and accurate dataset, a neural net can't be trained to pick out a "safe[enough]" emergency landing spot. And, a well trained net should be able to fly in any condition, including limited avionics, better than a human. You might ask where this data will be coming from. I suspect 3D physics simulations are accurate enough that they could be used to generate data. Particularly if optimized for the physics behind helicopter handling.

rmason 8y ago

Right now if you take an ordinary ambulance and let it enter one of Elon Musk's Boring Company tunnels and speed towards the hospital at 150 mph with no time outs for traffic that would be a large enough advance for most people with way less risk. Sometimes one new "good enough" technology overtakes a sexier one.

skybrian 8y ago
That's not "right now", that's another future possibility. No such tunnel exists.

tlb 8y ago

Would a sufficiently good track record convince you? Say, a million flights with 80% lower accident rates than human pilots? A strict utilitarian should only care about accident rates. But as Greene [0] and others show, most people don't make moral judgements in a strictly utilitarian way. Thus, we judge homicide as worse than choosing not to save someone from death, even though in both cases someone dies as a result of a decision. One of the lessons from probing moral calculus is that nobody can really articulate reasons for their actual moral decisions. People can articulate utilitarianism, but not what people actually do. But, if you can articulate why you might prefer a human pilot over an autopilot, even given sufficient statistics that the autopilot is safer, it'd be interesting to hear. [0] http://www.joshua-greene.net/ http://www.joshua-greene.net/

benmowa 8y ago
what about the one-in-a-million events that pilots continuously train for? Is one million flights a large enough sample?
- tlb 8y ago
  The current helicopter accident rate for emergency medical service is 3.9 / 100,000 flight hours [0], so a million flights is probably large enough. But feel free to answer the question based on some larger number that would convince you it's statistically safer. [0] https://www.aea.net/events/rotorcraft/files/US_Rotorcraft_Accident_Data_And_Statistics.pdf https://www.aea.net/events/rotorcraft/files/US_Rotorcraft_Ac...
oliveshell 8y ago
I think I could be convinced, eventually— but it would take quite a lot of evidence. A consistently lower accident rate than human pilots would be a good start, but it would be even better if those flights were conducted in the most punishing weather conditions possible and in all sorts of dangerous scenarios where pilot error is likely. One of the biggest factors is that it is terrifying to imagine falling out of the sky in an aircraft under the command of a software-based pilot with which I cannot communicate and that I cannot see doing everything it possibly can to avert disaster. It may not be a rational fear, but we humans are not rational creatures. It’s an issue of trust, which the folks interviewed in the article do acknowledge, to their credit. We can instinctively judge whether or not to trust another human being, because we have a lifetime of practice interacting with them. The burden of proof of safety for an uncommunicative mechanical system is much higher, and lots of testing (that I can observe on video) will go some way towards to building that trust. Furthermore, things like avoiding thunderstorms, the motion of which we still cannot predict with computers (turbulence being an unsolved problem in physics), could be very tricky for an automated system to handle. As autonomous technology progresses and we accumulate data, I might begin to feel differently. But for right now, without knowing all of the details of the system, I have no way of knowing how it is reasoning and perceiving the situation (I’m very familiar with the human consciousness, as I possess one myself) and this leads to a fundamental sort of uneasiness in my lizard brain. I’m still bullish on technology, though, and this is an area in which I would be enthusiastic to be proven wrong.