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Does anyone else miss the days when a single person could grok the design of a plane? Or a piece of software, or a car, or whatever? Now every new car needs t

Does anyone else miss the days when a single person could grok the design of a plane? Or a piece of software, or a car, or whatever? Now every new car needs to have adaptive cruise control and anti-lock brakes and stability control and Apple CarPlay and over-the-air updates and who knows what else, so there are a ton of things that are hopefully well-behaved black boxes that people hopefully understand mostly correctly, but who knows what could go wrong in a rogue OTA update or something. I'm not all that familiar with the aerospace industry, but this feels the same. Of course all of these components will be tested, but if no one understands the whole package, who knows what fearsome edge case awaits when Flight Safety Program 32 gets in a fight with Flap Threshold Control Program 3 or whatever.

mrtksn 7y ago
I think in those days they needed to have an Engineer in addition to the pilots to fly it and the cars were very unsafe and unreliable.
- ng7j5d9 7y ago
  That's a great point. Air travel has gotten measurably safer and people survive car accidents at much greater rates. I guess there's just something more "understandable" about a plane crashing due to an engine failure rather than software fighting the pilot. Or it's more understandable when someone died in a car crash because they couldn't control a skid rather than Autopilot driving into a concrete barrier it avoided previously because something inscrutable in the programming changed. Perhaps we're heading towards a world with on average better, but less well-understood, outcomes.
  - mrtksn 7y ago
    I agree but we can still reason with the current systems in use. MCAS crashing planes is not that different from metal fatigue IMO. In both cases, we can look back and say "Okay, that's how it happened and we screwed up because we made a design mistake" which is very different from Autopilot driving into concrete barriers because that's a very high-level mistake. We wouldn't have a problem with the software not recognising barriers or mistake road lines correctly as long as this software doesn't claim to be able to handle high-level decisions and fail on something extremely obvious to humans leading to great damages.

mrtksn 7y ago

I think in those days they needed to have an Engineer in addition to the pilots to fly it and the cars were very unsafe and unreliable.

ng7j5d9 7y ago
That's a great point. Air travel has gotten measurably safer and people survive car accidents at much greater rates. I guess there's just something more "understandable" about a plane crashing due to an engine failure rather than software fighting the pilot. Or it's more understandable when someone died in a car crash because they couldn't control a skid rather than Autopilot driving into a concrete barrier it avoided previously because something inscrutable in the programming changed. Perhaps we're heading towards a world with on average better, but less well-understood, outcomes.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  I agree but we can still reason with the current systems in use. MCAS crashing planes is not that different from metal fatigue IMO. In both cases, we can look back and say "Okay, that's how it happened and we screwed up because we made a design mistake" which is very different from Autopilot driving into concrete barriers because that's a very high-level mistake. We wouldn't have a problem with the software not recognising barriers or mistake road lines correctly as long as this software doesn't claim to be able to handle high-level decisions and fail on something extremely obvious to humans leading to great damages.