Comment by landryraccoon
3 months ago
This is a general objection to AI responding to real world events in general : "What if something unexpected happens?" It comes up in self driving as well. Things like "What if something suddenly appears in the middle of the road" or "Can it drive in snow conditions with zero visibility?
My question is, how do you know that in general human beings respond better to unexpected or very complex / difficult situations than an automated system would? Yes, human beings can improvise, but automated systems can have reaction times more than an order of magnitude faster than that of even the quickest humans.
I'd like to see some statistics on the opposing hypothesis : How good are humans, really, when encountering unexpected situations? Do they compare better with automated systems in general?
Here's a competing hypothesis: An automated system can incorporate training data based on every recorded incident that has ever happened. Unless a situation is so unexpected that it has literally never happened in the history of aviation, an AI system can have an example of how to handle that scenario. Is it really true that the average human operator would beat this system in safety and reliability? How many humans know how to respond to every rare situation that has ever happened? It's at least possible that the AI does better on average.
In theory, everything works. In practice, we can't even master automated driving, on two dimensional streets with painted lanes, relatively slow speeds, and cars that can just stop in case a decision could not be made. If we can't make this happen, how do you expecct the same with higher speeds, an additional dimension, planes with radio-only (no additional telemetry) and pilots with heavy accents?
>Unless a situation is so unexpected that it has literally never happened in the history of aviation,
I would say this is actually the most likely scenario for an edge case. The sheer number of variables make it unlikely that the same unexpected event would happen twice.
In an emergency situation the combination of, the emergency, ground conditions, weather, visibility, instrumentation functionality, and surrounding aircraft is most frequently going to be unique.
> I'd like to see some statistics on the opposing hypothesis : How good are humans, really, when encountering unexpected situations? Do they compare better with automated systems in general?
This is already out there. You can go research how Airbus and their automation works in practice.
You can also listen to air traffic control recordings to get an idea of what types of emergencies exist and how often they happen. I'm sure the FAA has records you can look at. :)
Now that apply that to something 3 orders of magnitude more complex.