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This tech is just now making it into military aircraft in the F-35 (it’s designed to compensate for failures or combat damage while keeping the plane’s handling

This tech is just now making it into military aircraft in the F-35 (it’s designed to compensate for failures or combat damage while keeping the plane’s handling relatively consistent), so I would guess it’ll be a while before we see a civilian version.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
"Figure out a way to fly the thing in the new, crippled configuration" is hard. Figure out a way that's better than what the human pilot came up with may be even harder.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  It's hard, but it's a very measurable problem. You randomly deform the airframe in a physics simulator, then get a real pilot to try to fly the simulated damaged airframe to the nearest airport. You then get an AI to try doing the same. As soon as the AI manages to get to the airport more often than the human, the tech will save lives, on average. My guess is a PhD student could come up with an AI passing the above test inside a year. Yet aviation standards are stringent enough AI will be decades away from production use, if ever.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    The political problem is that people still trust humans a lot more than they trust machines. So passengers would be nervous about being flown by an AI, even if the AI was safer. There's some weird psychology behind this: human pilots/drivers/etc are seen by passengers as a personal proxy, with agency over any situation. If you take away the proxy you take away the illusion of agency. Humans really do not like being put into situations where they believe they have no agency at all. As AI gets smarter, this will become more and more of a problem, until there some kind of cultural shift because AI is obviously safer it's not even a question any more. This may or may not happen.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    Your link to ZTE trumpeting the success of an algorithm helping an actual physical model of a quadcopter with a disabled rotor operating in lab conditions to crashland a bit more softly might be interpreted as a hint that the general case of safely landing a stricken aircraft is the sort of problem that probably isn't solved by a single PhD in a year... Keeping those with enough hubris to say "yeah, shouldn't take long if we've got some sort of sort of simulator to devise scenarios for a neural network to overfit to" about a wide range of failure modes that an entire field has spent decades studying well away from safety critical systems might be one of the more underappreciated aspects of tight regulation.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

"Figure out a way to fly the thing in the new, crippled configuration" is hard. Figure out a way that's better than what the human pilot came up with may be even harder.

londons_explore 8y ago
It's hard, but it's a very measurable problem. You randomly deform the airframe in a physics simulator, then get a real pilot to try to fly the simulated damaged airframe to the nearest airport. You then get an AI to try doing the same. As soon as the AI manages to get to the airport more often than the human, the tech will save lives, on average. My guess is a PhD student could come up with an AI passing the above test inside a year. Yet aviation standards are stringent enough AI will be decades away from production use, if ever.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  The political problem is that people still trust humans a lot more than they trust machines. So passengers would be nervous about being flown by an AI, even if the AI was safer. There's some weird psychology behind this: human pilots/drivers/etc are seen by passengers as a personal proxy, with agency over any situation. If you take away the proxy you take away the illusion of agency. Humans really do not like being put into situations where they believe they have no agency at all. As AI gets smarter, this will become more and more of a problem, until there some kind of cultural shift because AI is obviously safer it's not even a question any more. This may or may not happen.
- notahacker 8y ago
  Your link to ZTE trumpeting the success of an algorithm helping an actual physical model of a quadcopter with a disabled rotor operating in lab conditions to crashland a bit more softly might be interpreted as a hint that the general case of safely landing a stricken aircraft is the sort of problem that probably isn't solved by a single PhD in a year... Keeping those with enough hubris to say "yeah, shouldn't take long if we've got some sort of sort of simulator to devise scenarios for a neural network to overfit to" about a wide range of failure modes that an entire field has spent decades studying well away from safety critical systems might be one of the more underappreciated aspects of tight regulation.