Originally Posted by
MaverickSu35S
You said it well when you said: "For good or evil". In fact we will see that it's NOT the "good" that will win in this AI (artificial intelligence) fantasy, but the evil itself. We just had 2 awful answers (the 2 accidents of the MAX) from our subject regarding how does the plane try to automatically (apparently intelligent) trim the nose down continuously until "it believes" that the stall has been eliminated. One A330 had a cruise incident while another A330 and a belly (crash) landing due to "automation gone wild" encounters! This case showed one more glimpse of what it's like to lay your belief in automation.
If safety is still to be no.1, then automation should only be there to relax the pilot, NOT turn him into a donkey that doesn't know how to fly anymore after so much "auto" in his head. The pilot remains a pilot, if he still wants to be called that way anymore.
Regards!
Automation and Artificial Intelligence are not one and the same. With automation control systems automatically respond in a predetermined manner to a combination of airplane state and pilot input. With Artificial Intelligence the control system is designed to “think” on its own and come up with control actions that have not necessarily been deterministically defined.
There are plenty of examples of automation in the current state of the art in commercial aviation. Many of the performance improvements we have realized over the past generation would not have been possible without automation. That ship has sailed and there is no turning back to pre-automation days in aviation.
On the other hand, while I have no doubt that AI will find itself playing a greater and greater role in commercial aviation over the coming years, we need to proceed with caution down that road. It is one thing to design an AI system to drive a car where you always have the option of slowing and stopping on the side of the road if something unexpected comes up that the AI determines it is not ready to sort out. In an airplane it is quite another story when the unexpected happens. There are no pull over and stop options between takeoff and landing.