Xraying of hand baggage

[davidjohnson6]

Whenever passing through airport security, there is a person staring at coloured Xray images of hand baggage deciding if a human being needs to take a closer look or not. Yes, I get that the Xray machine has some clever logic to pick out when an Xray image contains something looking like a gun or bomb.

Why is there still a person at each lane, looking at all these images ? Could image interpretation not be substantially automated, so just one person remotely inspects images of maybe 2 or 3 Xray machines at once, with AI doing the drudge work

[Lantern10]

Maybe it has got more to do with "being seen" to be doing something.

[Asturias56]

Gives them a sit down period on while working each security line

but seriously sometimes the AI just isn't up to it whereas a human can ID something odd quite quickly

I've seen someone literally fall asleep at T5 LHR when watching the screen - a quiet word with the Supervisor was needed

[surely not]

At peak times the volume of images that 1 person would have to deal with from 2-3 security lines, would quickly swamp the poor blighter given the task. It's all fine and dandy until they have to inspect one image more closely to come to a decision. Then they would have to stop the other lines they were responsible for checking as well as the line that they had the query on. End result, slower and less efficient screening for the passengers.
Why are we rushing to eradicate jobs that don't need to be? The population of the world isn't getting significantly less, yet some seem to be hell bent on removing jobs, just because they can.

[Asturias56]

"Why are we rushing to eradicate jobs that don't need to be? The population of the world isn't getting significantly less, yet some seem to be hell bent on removing jobs, just because they can."

To be fair - these jobs were created by Al Qaida and friends - they weren't necessary before that . Technology has (finally) caught up and so the immense waste of time and effort at security may fall at long last