It's not totally unsolvable, it's just very hard. Most catastrophic failures were on flights that were 99.99% ordinary. It's that last 0.01% where everything w

It's not totally unsolvable, it's just very hard. Most catastrophic failures were on flights that were 99.99% ordinary. It's that last 0.01% where everything went horribly wrong. We're barely able to make a self-driving vacuum cleaner that doesn't periodically malfunction in a catastrophic way (https://www.scarymommy.com/roomba-meets-pile-of-poop-jesse-newton/ https://www.scarymommy.com/roomba-meets-pile-of-poop-jesse-n...), and self-driving cars at least have the option of stopping when too confused to proceed. Planes are committed from the moment they take off to somehow get back on the ground safely. The clock is running. When a mechanical malfunction occurs that remaining time can get cut dramatically, from hours to minutes, in an instant. It's an enormously complex job to fly a plane even with two human-level intelligences on board. If we have human-level AI it will be easy, but until then it'll be a reach. Drones are a little simpler, but they also have a more complex environment to navigate. Large commercial jets don't need to avoid trees or being attacked by birds. They don't have to worry about falling out of the sky because they clipped a power line they couldn't see. If anything they're easier to fly than a drone if you're concerned about safety. First let's see an autonomous drone work well in a closed environment like a factory or doing drone racing. Then we'll know how hard it is to get out of that safe space.