Comment by mlinhares
14 hours ago
Such an incredible write up, the piece about the importance of flying less technological planes to get a "sense" of what flying really is hits like a brick, specially in the world of LLMs producing code.
How do you get this "sense" of writing code and building systems by yourself if all you do is instruct some agent to do it? Are we all going to be like Bonin in the future where we just don't understand anything outside of the agent box?
This is both terrifying and sad.
I'm a software engineer and recently got my pilot's license, and the training for the pilot's license increased my (already-high) respect for the aviation profession. All pilots learn to fly basic airplanes and have to do everything by hand (often on paper, but an iPad is allowed) to show they know the basics. The result is that by the time you work up to more advanced planes you have climbed the ladder of abstraction and know what underpins the automation.
The other piece of the picture is that pilots acknowledge that their skills are perishable, and they have to commit to ongoing training. This would be analogous to writing code by hand and getting a licensed engineer to sign off on your currency periodically even if you use LLMs for work.
But I mean flying a cessna vrs something that has fly-by-wire like Airbus jets, its not really about understanding abstractions or anything, since the plane is basically a fundamentally different machine no? Basic principles of gravity and physic apply sure, but the flying experience is 100% different and not like a levelling up thing right? Like i would not trust someone with a Cessna pilot license to fly the airbus i am on.
I’ve flown a couple single engine aircraft.
I put it this way:
Commercial aviation pilots don’t really fly the plane as such. It’s more like a 1:1 real-time flight sim. They’re sort of up there having a LARP.
They’re flying in a similar sense that a DJ creates music.
A Cessna has very different aerodynamic issues than a jetliner. Multi-engine also has its own issues (such as if one engine dies, the airplane tries to turn around it).
Setting a Cessna down on the runway is fairly strait forward. A jetliner, on the other hand, is quite complex to land.
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But it wasn't at all just about Bonin: Robert and Bonin repeatedly kept trying to override each other; Robert was giving Bonin some information with which he could have figured out he was stalling (although Robert was also trying to climb); and Dubois had gone to deal with his sleep deprivation without designating either of them as PIC, and when Dubois finally returned (2:11:40, sounds still sleep-deprived based on his confusion) he didn't recognize the obvious stall or take control until they had lost almost all of their altitude.
It makes Air France look worse that all three pilots didn't react properly (or weren't trained or experienced), than just faulting Bonin. And at least two of them were sleep-deprived. But there were multiple systemic failures, not just the pilots.
Novella "Profession" by Isaac Asimov.
"Profession" is often cited with regard to LLMs, but honestly, in reminded more of (and scared by) "The Feeling of Power".
The irony of not understanding almost 100% of the code on modern airplanes is actually done by instructing a program to actually generate the code. It is neither terrifying nor sad. You expect humans to write millions of lines of code? At that scale, procedureally generating code is much safer and smarter.
Those millions of lines of code can often be reduced 10x or 100x with just a bit of common sense, and with that also reducing the potential bug count by 10x to 100x.
Also unlike LLMs, traditional code generation techniques are deterministic.
I'm not flying anymore if that's the case.
Actually there are more planes flying today than ever and the number of accidents is very very low, thanks to technological planes and protocols that lean from mistakes.
So low in fact that the majority of the recent "accidents" look like suicides from the pilots. The pilots know exactly what they are doing when crashing the planes.
Boooo!