Originally Posted by
tdracer
Fully autonomous passenger aircraft will happen - it's only a matter of time. The only real question is how much time - years, decades? Computing power continues to expand exponentially, the human capabilities not so much.
My personal view is we're still decades away (single pilot - really only there to take action if the automation goes crazy - will happen first). Examples of the humans saving the day with the current aircraft are meaningless - current aircraft are not designed to be autonomous, they are designed to reduce crew workload but to hand the aircraft back to the human(s) if things go south. Commercial aircraft have become incredibly safe and rarely crash - but the percentage of those crashes that can be attributed to either suicidal pilots (e.g. Germanwings) or incomprehensibly bad piloting keeps going up (latest example being PIA 8303).
Fully autonomous cars have proved to be more difficult than expected, but progress is continuing and eventually they well become mainstream - and I foresee a future where human controlled autos will be banned from most roads since they 'unsafe' (I probably won't live to see it, but I expect it will happen). There will come a time when people will start to wonder why they can ride safely to the airport in a fully autonomous taxi - so why do we still let human pilots try to land a perfectly serviceable aircraft at 210 knots with the gear up...
You make several salient points. The field of computer- vision, and semisupervised learning grant us significant useful information, but we have had higher than expected application of cost functions, and differentiation in variables (issues) which represent real-world events than we expected.