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Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated. The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well do

Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated. The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements. The biggest two problems that immediately come to mind: 1) Current ATC communication with planes happens by human voice over radio. Wouldn't want to trust an AI's speech recognition over that medium, so you'd probably have to mandate some kind of pilot-ATC interface that all planes would need to carry. You'd get huge pushback from the community of small planes. Probably from commercial pilots as well, since they'd have to train on the new system, and it would likely add to their cognitive load, at least short term. 2) We've put a ton of effort into producing a good radar picture to let controllers know where planes are, but it's far from perfect and requires some intuition. Radar waves bend due to atmospheric conditions, and it's difficult/impossible to distinguish real targets from various forms of clutter. The heuristics we currently use are pretty amazing, but you still get things popping up on ATC's radar scope that aren't really there.

himinlomax 6y ago
> Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated The tools ATCs use have evolved tremendously. Just three decades ago, not all major airports had ground radar for instance. Then there's ADS-B that's fully automated and does part of the job. The problem is that air traffic has increased a lot. Even if automation goes much further, ATCs are needed for supervision of operation, compliance and backup in case systems fail. The evolution mirrors that of the job of pilots. Flight engineers have been rendered obsolete long ago, maybe copilots will be eventually replaced by a remote operators for backup at some point. Each ATC will be able to handle more and more traffic, as they already have, but someone's gotta be keeping an eye on the system.
dylan604 6y ago
> The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements. Yes, so is actually flying a plane. However, MCAS let us see how badly things can go wrong following rules that were not well defined/understood/studied. Contributing to that was the system's method of knowing its environment came from sensors. If/when those sensors malfunction then the system is useless. At the end of the day, even if 100% of all instruments and sensors were to stop working, a human can still use its back up sensors (eyes,ears,brain) to continue flying where the auto system pretty much is game over.

himinlomax 6y ago

> Guessing this is humorous, but it does seem like a job that could one day benefit from being automated The tools ATCs use have evolved tremendously. Just three decades ago, not all major airports had ground radar for instance. Then there's ADS-B that's fully automated and does part of the job. The problem is that air traffic has increased a lot. Even if automation goes much further, ATCs are needed for supervision of operation, compliance and backup in case systems fail. The evolution mirrors that of the job of pilots. Flight engineers have been rendered obsolete long ago, maybe copilots will be eventually replaced by a remote operators for backup at some point. Each ATC will be able to handle more and more traffic, as they already have, but someone's gotta be keeping an eye on the system.

dylan604 6y ago

> The job is highly rules-based, and the rules are well documented requirements. Yes, so is actually flying a plane. However, MCAS let us see how badly things can go wrong following rules that were not well defined/understood/studied. Contributing to that was the system's method of knowing its environment came from sensors. If/when those sensors malfunction then the system is useless. At the end of the day, even if 100% of all instruments and sensors were to stop working, a human can still use its back up sensors (eyes,ears,brain) to continue flying where the auto system pretty much is game over.