>>Unless, of course, you think friendly human-serving general-purpose AI will be available within the next two or three decades (I don't). /sigh. A decade ago

>>Unless, of course, you think friendly human-serving general-purpose AI will be available within the next two or three decades (I don't). /sigh. A decade ago I started my bachelors. When I was in college, I expected that general-purpose AI will be readily available by this point. How naive I was! Currently, I doubt it will be available by that point in time. /sigh I do not know how much progress will be achieved within the next two or three decades. In the circumstances of passenger flights, keeping current solutions is likely a conservative and more pragmatic approach. With regards to my comment, I do not expect autopilots to substitute pilots. Instead, I expect that they should be able to handle additional tasks assigned from the pilots. For example, it was not a passenger flight, but a helicopter crashed in Nepal during the rescue from the earthquake. I wonder if its pilot had fore-warning from sensory information prior to the crash; and if they had not, how to design its warning system and if an autopilot could take control of the helicopter to land it safely. The sources I have read on passenger pilots use of autopilots is: http://flyingforeveryone.blogspot.com/2012/01/autopilot-myth-what-your-pilot-really.html http://flyingforeveryone.blogspot.com/2012/01/autopilot-myth... http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/1802/why-do-we-still-use-pilots-to-fly-airplanes http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/1802/why-do-we-s...