LoneWolf said: While my gut instinct is to recoil at this concept, my brain tells me that the pilot of the A330 must know his robot, and its habits, inside and out, or the chance of a robot and a human brain working at cross purposes poses some scary ( to me ) problems.
That really got my attention. I heard a NASA/JPL robotics-expert lecturer define a robot as a machine that can make autonomous decisions, and the A330 and its kin are certainly that - surely the largest and likely most 'intelligent' robots man has built so far. I wonder if it helps the cockpit to think of it that way.