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Air travel is already safe. Statistics show 1.27 deaths per 100,000 flight hours, or another stat in a single year you have the odds of dying as 1 in 4 million

Air travel is already safe. Statistics show 1.27 deaths per 100,000 flight hours, or another stat in a single year you have the odds of dying as 1 in 4 million or so. You are more likely to die driving to the airport. How would having no pilots decrease those odds significantly? I would think that any decrease due to a computer doing it better would be offset by bugs in the software or unanticipated situations.

Evolved 12y ago
You don't need me to agree but I do agree. Plane travel is immensely safer than car travel. The only reason plane crashes make the news more than car crashes is because of the rarity and the massive casualties (sometimes).
userbinator 12y ago
would be offset by bugs in the software or unanticipated situations Indeed, it's always the "unanticipated situations" that cause problems both for humans and computers - and in the case of flying, I think it's better to have some level of automation to reduce human error, but there must always be a manual override. Completely replacing the pilot with innumerable lines of code executed by a computer would be even more dangerous as it's far more likely that a pilot can react intelligently to assess the situation and take manual control of the plane than someone be able to immediately find the bug and fix it, without introducing any new ones, then update the software "on-the-fly" (literally). It's similar to the issues that abstractions cause in software: the more we rely on them to hide details, and the more complex the systems we build as a result, the harder it is to reason about the problems that arise due to something lower down in the stack. "Out of sight, out of mind." Here is a related article about this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-death http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-dea...
melling 12y ago
No one said that it wasn't safe. However, why wouldn't we'd still try to improve on good? One commercial crash in one lifetime should be a lot.

Evolved 12y ago

You don't need me to agree but I do agree. Plane travel is immensely safer than car travel. The only reason plane crashes make the news more than car crashes is because of the rarity and the massive casualties (sometimes).

userbinator 12y ago

would be offset by bugs in the software or unanticipated situations Indeed, it's always the "unanticipated situations" that cause problems both for humans and computers - and in the case of flying, I think it's better to have some level of automation to reduce human error, but there must always be a manual override. Completely replacing the pilot with innumerable lines of code executed by a computer would be even more dangerous as it's far more likely that a pilot can react intelligently to assess the situation and take manual control of the plane than someone be able to immediately find the bug and fix it, without introducing any new ones, then update the software "on-the-fly" (literally). It's similar to the issues that abstractions cause in software: the more we rely on them to hide details, and the more complex the systems we build as a result, the harder it is to reason about the problems that arise due to something lower down in the stack. "Out of sight, out of mind." Here is a related article about this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-death http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-dea...

melling 12y ago

No one said that it wasn't safe. However, why wouldn't we'd still try to improve on good? One commercial crash in one lifetime should be a lot.