You're gonna lose your jobs!

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Please, keep telling everyone that the front seats of airliners are going to be filled by a robot that has zero self-preservation instinct and zero fucks given about the fleshy, squishy humans sitting behind it by the hundreds. Maybe the technology industry will actually make an AI that could fly a plane. And then it could be smart enough to make an even better version of itself without our help.

This is why I think driver-less cars and trucks are a pipe dream. As soon as one of those driver-less vehicles plows into a crowd of people the lawsuits will come in hot and heavy.

[Lace Neil Singer]

Leaving aside the customers who will continue to want to come in and pay, have you ever actually tried explaining this part to these idiots? Just wondering what their response was, if you did ...

I have, and they are very surprised as tho I was explaining nuclear fission to them.

As for pilot-less planes and driver-less cars, I really don't see those working for one reason; random madness. Like a bird flying into a plane, or a deer jumping in front of the car. Perhaps a tree falling on to the road, a child dashing in front of a car, ice forming on plane wings... all these things require human ingenuity to get by. It makes me shiver to think of a driver-less car merrily rolling over a loose child.

[dalesys]

... the lawsuits will come in hot and heavy.

I'll bet that the laws get "adjusted" to "maintain our technological edge."

Yes, I am a cynic².

[Swordsman422]

Vehicles of all types without operators Will work under one condition: there HAS to be 100% saturation. One human operator can throw off the whole orchestra. And while self-operated vehicles might be great for safety, they sure aren't a whole lot of fun.

For me, it's not just being up in the air that makes flying a plane enjoyable. I'm not content to be a passenger. It's the challenge of shooting a good approach, hitting all your altitude cues in the pattern, or greasing a landing so well that grandma doesn't spill her tea. It's watching the needles on the heading indicator, altimeter, and vertical speed indicator start moving at the same time and then stop at the same time as I, a mere and imperfect human, perform a precision descending turn. Though it's SOP for us to use the autopilot at work, I hardly ever use it if a GA plane I'm renting has one equipped even if I'm in the air for 2-3 hours. And I'm not the only one. There are plenty of people who enjoy the challenge of flight for recreation.

I know a lot of us would happily nap through a commute every morning. But taking a self-driving car on, say, a mountain road would just now be as fun as driving those twisting roads yourself despite the risks. Why own a Dodge Challenger, or a Cooper Mini, or a Subaru WRX, or a Ferrari if you never get to know the joy of operating it?

I have some other concerns about self-operating vehicles: computers being the final decision-makers on airplanes has proven to be a bad idea. Ever hear of Air Transat Flight 236? It was an airbus A330 bound for Lisbon from Toronto. During a poor repair, a hydraulic line for the right aileron was laid over a fuel transfer line. A hydraulic line doesn't just sit there. It throbs as the fluid inside is pumped around. This hydraulic line sawed right through the fuel line, causing a fuel leak. This in and of itself wasn't a serious issue. Airliners have more than one fuel tank. If the flight crew is able to catch it, they can save a majority of the fuel by transferring it to another tank and shutting the fuel line off. Once no fuel is moving through that line, the leak stops.

The problem we now encounter is particular to Airbus aircraft. I like Airbus products. I like Boeings better, but generally Airbus jets are pretty cool. That being said, they have some weird quirks. One of them is that the flight computer, in an effort to decrease pilot workload, makes a lot of assumptions about what a pilot wants to do in order to anticipate crew needs. Pilots start to lean of the computer's judgement and it leads to issues. Anticipating a landing profile was how Air France 296 ended up in the trees instead of climbing safely away after a slow flyby at an airshow. Airbus computers also make decisions about aircraft operations sometimes without making use of all available data. In the case of AT236, the onboard computers detected the leak as a fuel imbalance and recommended to the crew or decided independently (reports vary) to correct it by pumping MORE fuel through the leaking line and subsequently right out the airplane until there wasn't any left. A simple check of fuel flow rates per side would have indicated a fuel leak, but instead AT236 ran out of go-juice over the Atlantic Ocean. The captain was fortunately a skilled and experienced glider pilot and was able to glide the 250-ton jetliner 65 miles to a safe landing in the Azores.

I hope we are not heading into an age where automation is the norm, but the demand will come from corporations looking to cut down on overhead to maximize profits for the benefit of upper management and the stockholders. What they will fail too late to realize is that they can't sell their products or services to a population facing mass unemployment due to being replaced by robots. But if companies really though beyond next quarter's earning statement, there'd be a lot less need for regulation.

Pixelated, thank you. That's a real compliment knowing you'd rather have a human at the controls. Hats off.

[notalwaysright]

Vehicles of all types without operators Will work under one condition: there HAS to be 100% saturation. One human operator can throw off the whole orchestra. And while self-operated vehicles might be great for safety, they sure aren't a whole lot of fun.

Hey, that's what I've always said. It has to be all self driving or none, anything else just causes problems. I personally can't wait for self driving cars that I actually trust. I hate driving. Hate hate hate. I even waited until I was 17 to get my drivers license. That was the longest I could get away with mooching rides from friends.

Ideally somebody will crack teleportation technology. Come on, they've invented a lot of other things featured on Star Trek. Though there is a helmsman on Star Trek... So even then the ships aren't completely controlled by the computer.

[wolfie]

Vehicles of all types without operators Will work under one condition: there HAS to be 100% saturation. One human operator can throw off the whole orchestra. And while self-operated vehicles might be great for safety, they sure aren't a whole lot of fun.

One science fiction novel I read over half a lifetime ago had as a "throwaway" line that the bike paths were now wider than the highways. Why? Because the cars were self-driving but bicycles were still human-operated.

Though it's SOP for us to use the autopilot at work,

That's one thing I've seen pointed out as a BAD THING. Computers are good at monitoring, and squawking if things go out of bounds, but are bad at handling unanticipated situations. Humans are bad at monitoring for extended periods, but trained and experienced humans are good at handling unanticipated situations. What do the airlines do? Have the computers run things, getting first crack at dealing with unanticipated situations, while humans monitor them for hours on end.

[Swordsman422]

That's one thing I've seen pointed out as a BAD THING. Computers are good at monitoring, and squawking if things go out of bounds, but are bad at handling unanticipated situations. Humans are bad at monitoring for extended periods, but trained and experienced humans are good at handling unanticipated situations. What do the airlines do? Have the computers run things, getting first crack at dealing with unanticipated situations, while humans monitor them for hours on end.

This is also why, even when the autopilot is doing it's thing, the PIC for the flight keeps his hands on the yoke at all times. If the autopilot goes tango uniform, you can at least start to feel it there.

I had a friend who was flying right seat on a Beechcraft King Air. Mid flight over the plains, the autopilot starts making some very bad decisions. The trim wheel starts spinning out of control in the worst direction, which is nose down. The captain was having to use both arms to keep the aircraft level, squeezing black juice out of the yoke (not literally. This is a figure of speech indicating a tight grip on a flight control in a white-knuckle situation. If we could actually squeeze black juice out of the yoke, it'd be kinda gross... come to think of it, maybe we can. I think this is how some diners get their coffee). While the captain is fighting the machine with all his strength, my buddy is trying to input commands to the autopilot and it is just not going to respond. Turning the altitude dial, the vertical speed setting, the autothrottle; nothing worked. Finally, he reaches over to the breaker panel and just pulls the breaker for the autopilot. The autopilot shuts off and they get the plane back. Talk about a scary situation. We flyers like to think that we're cool all the time (we never are. Pilots only impress boy scouts and other pilots), but the both of them freely admitted that they were terrified out of their wits.

[dalesys]

... admitted that they were terrified out of their wits.

Diaper change. Cockpit. Stat.

[greek_jester]

I had a friend who was flying right seat on a Beechcraft King Air... *snip*

That right there should be the training example of why, exactly, you never take your hands off of the yoke! Kudos to your mate. That could have gone very fatal, very quickly.

[Aria]

Not to mention that the computers will do what humans tell them to and we are geniuses at farking it up.

Since we're talking about planes, I saw an episode of Mayday once... a software 'upgrade' was put through to prevent the pilots from making too much noise when they landed or something. Well, the 'upgrade' kind of missed the fact that the actions it was preventing were also what the pilot would do if the engine was surging. That didn't go too well.

I said to my mom, the exact same kind of thing has happened to me... of course, she told me I'm not a pilot. I said no, but the same management 'logic' has happened to me. Agents are abusing a process. Management puts in a software fix to make that process impossible. My team, however, uses that process in a very specialized and important way. We raise holy hell because we can't do our job and a week later everyone gets the process back.

The main difference is we have a week. In aviation, you have minutes.

[Lace Neil Singer]

Reminds me of the customers who fondly think that so called "unmanned" petrol stations are employee free, when doing so would simply result in a smoking ruin. In fact, those petrol stations are monitored by CCTV, with the staff watching the cameras with shut off buttons nearby, cuz humans just can't be trusted around flammable stuff.

[mjr]

Someone earlier mentioned automated pizza delivery...

I don't think I'd want my pizza delivered by this:

[raw1989]

Someone earlier mentioned automated pizza delivery...

I don't think I'd want my pizza delivered by this:

here we have pizza vending machine's.

[Nunavut Pants]

The main difference is we have a week. In aviation, you have minutes.

Plus, it tends to hurt a whole lot more if an update causes a system failure in an aircraft...

[Swordsman422]

Seconds. And it won't hurt for long enough to register.