7 ms·

There shouldnt even be pilots much less air traffic controllers. This is the same as the people that think subways need human drivers.

meowster 2y ago
Air Traffic Controller here. Tour an ATC facility and talk with them. You'll see why it can't be completely automated.
- petermcneeley 2y ago
  Yes but 99% probably could be. Go to Vancouver sometime. All the subways are automated. But in rare cases they need to be driven remotely and every few years they need to be driven by a human.
  - tnmom 2y ago
    ATC is a unique thing - if you’re interested, suggest listening to the https://www.opposingbases.com/ https://www.opposingbases.com/ podcast. It’s eye opening how much complexity they deal with, and how frequent the edge cases really are.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    It's the same issue that self-driving cars have. 99% can be automated. The remaining 1% is a bitch, and life-threatening. I've heard piloting described as 99% moments of boredom, followed by 1% moments of sheer terror. If you actually could program a computer to anticipate all of the possible scenarios in that 1%, it'd be good to take the sheer terror out of the equation. But it's frightening because those are the moments when something has gone wrong and normalcy no longer applies, and you need to apply collected knowledge, wisdom, and experience to save your life and the lives of your passengers.
    - petermcneeley 2y ago
      It is actually not like self driving at all. In the self driving case the nominal situation requires hard AI. In aircraft the nominal situation does not require hard AI, only the emergency situation. If aircraft did not have mechanical failures the nominal situation is really well defined. The ATC job is even more nominal since they are not actually dealing with the mechanics of the plane. I would guess that you could make a video game that covers 99.999% of all ATC jobs and you could undoubtly with enough effort also program an AI to cover this.
      - nostrademons 2y ago
        With self-driving cars the nominal situation does not require hard AI. I remember sitting in a TGIF back in 2012, when Waymo was still called Google Chauffeur, and they projected what the self-driving car sees as it drives down a road. It's just boxes of potential hazards, detected largely by LIDAR but backed up by cameras and traditional computer-vision approaches. The non-exceptional case for self-driving was a solved problem in 2012. My boss rode in a self-driving car at the time; they were available for beta testing by Googlers in Mountain View then. Heck, this is what L3 self-driving is, and is offered on the market now by Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Kia, and others.
        petermcneeley 2y ago
        Take all that you think and say about self driving cars and apply it to an ATC. The ATC job is probably an order of magnitude more automatable. Again I think something that would resolve this question quite easily would be a game that covers the domain. You can actually get a game that covers ~98% of what cars have to deal with. This would be something like GTA V
        nostrademons 2y ago
        You can get a game that covers 98% of ATCs have to deal with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Control_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Control_(video_game) It's the missing 2% that's hard.
MichaelMug 2y ago
The topic of automation always comes up when discussing ATC or aviation incidents. One says automation, another says it can’t be done. And both parties end up talking past each other. Let’s go back in time. Long ago pilots would give position updates. Now that is done with radar and transponders. This is a form of automation. There seems to be an uptick in ATC mistakes. Recently as this week where a tower cleared a takeoff and also cleared four aircraft to cross the same runway. So a form of automation I would like to see is something to communicate to everyone that a runway is not clear.

meowster 2y ago

Air Traffic Controller here. Tour an ATC facility and talk with them. You'll see why it can't be completely automated.

petermcneeley 2y ago
Yes but 99% probably could be. Go to Vancouver sometime. All the subways are automated. But in rare cases they need to be driven remotely and every few years they need to be driven by a human.
- tnmom 2y ago
  ATC is a unique thing - if you’re interested, suggest listening to the https://www.opposingbases.com/ https://www.opposingbases.com/ podcast. It’s eye opening how much complexity they deal with, and how frequent the edge cases really are.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  It's the same issue that self-driving cars have. 99% can be automated. The remaining 1% is a bitch, and life-threatening. I've heard piloting described as 99% moments of boredom, followed by 1% moments of sheer terror. If you actually could program a computer to anticipate all of the possible scenarios in that 1%, it'd be good to take the sheer terror out of the equation. But it's frightening because those are the moments when something has gone wrong and normalcy no longer applies, and you need to apply collected knowledge, wisdom, and experience to save your life and the lives of your passengers.
  - petermcneeley 2y ago
    It is actually not like self driving at all. In the self driving case the nominal situation requires hard AI. In aircraft the nominal situation does not require hard AI, only the emergency situation. If aircraft did not have mechanical failures the nominal situation is really well defined. The ATC job is even more nominal since they are not actually dealing with the mechanics of the plane. I would guess that you could make a video game that covers 99.999% of all ATC jobs and you could undoubtly with enough effort also program an AI to cover this.
    - nostrademons 2y ago
      With self-driving cars the nominal situation does not require hard AI. I remember sitting in a TGIF back in 2012, when Waymo was still called Google Chauffeur, and they projected what the self-driving car sees as it drives down a road. It's just boxes of potential hazards, detected largely by LIDAR but backed up by cameras and traditional computer-vision approaches. The non-exceptional case for self-driving was a solved problem in 2012. My boss rode in a self-driving car at the time; they were available for beta testing by Googlers in Mountain View then. Heck, this is what L3 self-driving is, and is offered on the market now by Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Kia, and others.
      - petermcneeley 2y ago
        Take all that you think and say about self driving cars and apply it to an ATC. The ATC job is probably an order of magnitude more automatable. Again I think something that would resolve this question quite easily would be a game that covers the domain. You can actually get a game that covers ~98% of what cars have to deal with. This would be something like GTA V
        nostrademons 2y ago
        You can get a game that covers 98% of ATCs have to deal with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Control_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Control_(video_game) It's the missing 2% that's hard.

MichaelMug 2y ago

The topic of automation always comes up when discussing ATC or aviation incidents. One says automation, another says it can’t be done. And both parties end up talking past each other. Let’s go back in time. Long ago pilots would give position updates. Now that is done with radar and transponders. This is a form of automation. There seems to be an uptick in ATC mistakes. Recently as this week where a tower cleared a takeoff and also cleared four aircraft to cross the same runway. So a form of automation I would like to see is something to communicate to everyone that a runway is not clear.