Comment by caaqil
1 day ago
> I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Airplane automation has shown to be rather bad at diagnosing what is wrong and coming up with a workaround.
For example, engine falls off. The automation doesn't know that happened, it just sees various problems like the hydraulic pressure falls, and for some reason the engine thrust went to zero.
When I was at Boeing, an incident was recounted to me where the autopilot glitched and rolled the plane over into a vertical dive. It was going so fast it entered "separation", where the airflow no longer flows over the flight controls. In other words, the pilots were just along for the ride.
But the pilot figures, since we're dead anyway, let's try lowering the landing gear and see if it slows the jet down. He did, and it ripped the doors off and bent the gear back, but it slowed enough that the flight controls could get a "bite" and the pilots were able to regain control and landed safely.
Many modern fighter jets literally cannot be flown by a human without automation, they're too unstable. It's simply not possible for a human to process the inputs and control the outputs in real-time sufficient to keep the fighter in the air. And that's old technology compared to the flight control systems in modern quadcopters - again, literally impossible for a human to pilot.
Suffice to say that what's in current civil jetliners is very far from the state of the art. I fully expect properly implemented and integrated AI to be far superior to human pilots in the future - it probably would be already, if we put the effort in.
> Many modern fighter jets literally cannot be flown by a human without automation, they're too unstable.
That's correct. But it's an easy problem to automate, because the problem being solved is well understood.
That's not the case for something randomly breaking.
I doubt the FAA would certify an AI running a jetliner, for the simple reason that if something unexpected happens, there's no way to predict what the AI will do. FSD for cars was done by collecting an incredible amount of data from the cameras on Teslas. Yet still, how much data was collected from Teslas having a catastrophic failure, like catching fire? A jetliner has a lot more failure modes than a car.
Being responsible for knowing what to do when autopilot fails has pretty good job security actually. The job might be babysitting, but no one wants to be in a flying tube without a captain that can at least let us know when we’re all going to die
> no one wants to be in a flying tube without a captain that can at least let us know when we’re all going to die
I'm not sure how the news being delivered by a carbon-based pilot would help with the dying part but I guess hospice care exists for a reason.
You’ve never been in a cockpit while a plane has been flying have you?
is there a reason to think swe won't become the same? llm pilot, accountability guy, and has enough skill to manually pilot in extraneous situations.
Pilots can do that because they go through a ton of training and they deliberately do things to maintain their manual flying skills, including regularly taking manual control outside emergencies when the autopilot could fly perfectly well. And when a pilot takes control "for practice" there's no reduction in productivity for the airline compared to if the pilot is sitting in the seat with the autopilot engaged.
How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set? What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
> What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
Lots of regulation or some landmark lawsuits should do it. If airlines operated the way tech companies did, we'd have daily plane crashes.
Pilots have to know all the ins and outs of every single system and subsystem of the machine they operate. If software engineers were required to understand their systems to the same degree in order to ship something, the only way you could do it is by coding yourself.
I honestly don't really see that big of a difference between a pilot and a software developer steering an agent. Both let a machine do 99% of the work.
It's not like the pilot instructs every single control surface individually. Nor does he physically carry every single passenger on his back.
Just because you're using a machine to do your job now doesn't really change anything substantial about the job other than the fact that you now need capital to pay the machine.
do you actually understand how modern airplanes work in practice or is this just based off the fact that an airplane can land by itself?
An airplane can land by itself IF it has auto land and IF the airport has cat III ILS and it is working perfectly fine.
yeah I am an aviation nerd and knew that but I was just trying to figure out how much they knew for such an outlandish claim.
> pilots are probably at peak automation
Any role where the human is a buffer against chaos should be thought of as secure by everyone involved. All automation and information flow will be in service to this position. This is not a bottleneck, it is the point of the exercise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
> No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Wow. You clearly have zero idea of what a pilot's job is, and it shows.
You are also severely underestimating how much work and regulation would be required to replace pilots. And this work can be undone in a flash the first time automation messes up.
Also note that plane automation heavily relies on sensors. Many plane accidents were caused by faulty sensors even with humans in the loop.