I think the biggest hurdle confronting computers ever having executive control will be their perception, by which I mean how the computer sees and analyses the world around it. The human vision system consists of the eyes and the brain. The eyes produce a rough upside-down image which the brain then processes by removing faults, flipping it over and combining views to give a stereo picture. The brain then uses short term memory to further enhance the scene by combining views of different focus and exposure to create an overall scene. It then uses long term memory to recognise what it is seeing.
An autonomous aircraft computer would need to be able to realise for example that the storm cell which wasn't painting very much on its radar was nevertheless there because it could see either the lightning or the large mass of the cloud by looking out of the window.
We are decades away from this ability in a computer - if indeed it could ever happen. For it to work safely we would have to build a complete human vision system.
There was an autonomous car that crashed recently, killing a person, because it couldn't tell the difference between a patch of bright sky and a white truck?
I saw Asimo, a humanoid robot a few years ago at the Science Museum. He was very impressive; he could walk up stairs by 'himself' and run unaided without a tether. However, to walk up 5 stairs he had to stand at the bottom for about 2 minutes, calculating what he had to do, and taking positional information from strategically placed marker dots on the stairs. It was nevertheless most impressive. However, at the end of the demonstration, as he walked out of the auditorium, he walked smack into a door that he was expecting to have been left open but had swung shut - such were his limitations of vision.
So this is the challenge. The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. It takes a human brain about 20 years to learn and program itself to fly an airliner: Given that when born it first has to make sense of the upside down sight from its eyes and the sounds from its ears; then learn language and to speak, to walk, to use its fingers etc etc, you get the point, I am sure.
There is no computer in the world that can take everything into account as we pilots do in order to fly an airliner, adapting to all the changes in conditions we meet on a daily basis. Yet there already are lots of fully programmed 'human brains' who are willing and able to fly airliners. There have indeed been some terrible crashes caused by humans, but all we need is to go back a step and restore proper selection standards for pilots; non fatiguing rosters; proper training; decent recurrent practice; etc, etc.
We don't need to reinvent the 'wheel' we simply need to make sure it is given a proper chance to work.
.
Last edited by Uplinker; 23rd Aug 2016 at 13:36.