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Comment by smileysteve | Hacker News Reader

> He is sub 20 years. I'm thinking more like 40-50 mark.

Perspective:

* 60 years ago, we didn't have highways.

* 45 years ago, seat belts weren't required.

* 40 years ago, we expected engines to last 10s of thousands of miles. We didn't really understand crumple zones. Open containers and even drinking while driving.

* 30 years, we added fuel injection, computers, and airbags.

* 20 years ago, the hybrid car, better fuel efficiency, and side airbags

Imagine what we'll know tomorrow.

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Perspective: nearly 50 years ago we did have Category IIIa instrument landing systems in commercial jet aircraft capable of landing without pilot input. We had reliable gyroscopic autopilot capable of keeping aircraft on a set course long before that.

Vast sums of money have been sunk into developing exceptionally reliable avionics systems since then.

Passenger carrying aircraft still all have a pilot or two.

Pilots on modern large aircraft are more like managers that tell the aircraft what to do, and do fly them to keep with minimum legal requirements (minimy numbers of landinds etc...)

And in the US, don't pilots still have to do the landing part?

And to complete the thought: the main reason why human pilots are still on all those aircraft is because... the automated/computerized systems still can't really make decisions that match what the humans can do. So the computer is really great at maintaining heading, altitude and speed for a set period of time, but really bad at deciding which heading, which altitude and which speed, and for how long (the best you can do that I'm aware of is have a human lay out the desired route and punch that into the FMC, and then all bets are off if conditions change along the way, and the humans will have to decide what to tell the plane to do again).

And those decisions themselves could be easily automated, but people choose not to. There's a checklist for making those decisions. If you can write a checklist, you can write code. And for when there's not a checklist, then you can pick randomly, because that's what the human is essentially doing.

A human can notice when new evidence becomes relevant. If something isn't already on a computer's checklist when it becomes relevant, the human has a better chance of deciding what to do.

EDIT: I understand that there is research going into making computers recognize "novel" situations. My comment only applies to algorithms that contain "checklists".

No, then you need to get meta. There's a checklist for identifying "novel" information and reacting. By checklist I mean algorithm.

Sure, it can be tough to tease out the algorithm from the minds of current pilots. Luckily in aviation we already have training manuals. In other domains it'd be tougher to know when we're done extracting knowledge from humans.

How close we are to the autopilot which would safely land a plane with engines off on the Hudson?

a) A human pilot who does combines exceptional luck with unusual skill

b) Said human pilot was aided considerably by the airplane's autopilot system

c) I'm not sure why you think software would find this particularly challenging?

It's not the landing that's difficult, it's the "write an algorithm which correctly identifies which specific parameters should cause the aircraft to choose a river near the airport as its landing site, and get approval for it" that's the difficult part.

How often does it happen, though? You don't need a human on every flight in order to deal with that. Build a few ground-based emergency remote-control centers across the continent, and train the autopilots (or the air traffic controllers) to call them when things get bad.

I'm not convinced anyone in the commercial aviation industry would agree with you.

Some on-ground duty pilot sitting in a simulator who's suddenly placed in control of an aircraft that's notified an anomaly seconds before landing has absolutely zero chance of being able to make the same judgement call as a human (co)pilot who's been sitting at the controls for the last few hours. And the likelihood of human input being required is highly correlated with the possibility the aircraft has lost connectivity and/or some of the equipment that's supposed to be sending back data is malfunctioning (and yeah, you could build in more redundancy, but that still doesn't eliminate the problem and probably costs more than the pilot)

I agree in a sense, but one thing to keep in mind is that all automation requires a large investment, especially in systems that cannot fail.

If the cost of that automation (programmers, testing, etc) is greater than the cost of training pilots, then pilots are going to remain.

Usually, there ends up being a middle ground - you automate the low-hanging fruit, and leave the last percentage points to the humans.

The exact opposite has happened to cars. We've delegated route building to our GPS devices, and we maintain heading and speed until the computer tells us to do something different.

So you're agreeing with GP poster that the legal objections are what will prevent self-driving cars on a large scale?

"60 years ago, we didn't have highways."

Not quite. Here's the US highway system in 1955.[1] Construction of the US Interstate Highway System started in 1956.

[1] http://www.mappery.com/map-of/Pre-Interstate-US-Highway-Syst...

He probably meant Interstates, and 1956 is 60 years ago, which is why I'm guessing that. Interstate 5 (Seattle portion) was only completed in 1969[0] so depending on where you are, it could be significantly less.

[0] - http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&...

Good point. I-80 wasn't complete coast-to-coast until 1986. There were gaps in the Western sections for years. That was the first coast-to-coast Interstate, the old Lincoln Highway route. I-40, the "Route 66" route, was completed even later.

All these were some sort of win win, not hard sells, low resistance. SDV are rotating the notion of driving and the economy around it, car dealers, oil companies. It won't be the same game at all in my view.

> 60 years ago, we didn't have highways.

What?

> 30 years, we added fuel injection, computers, and airbags.

But we knew about them for a lot longer than that. Fuel injection was used in aircraft during WWII.

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