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> Garmin Autoland will take a plane which is otherwise working and is in the sky and put it back on the ground because the pilot has a problem...

Indeed. For reasonable values of "land" and "on the ground." It's better than a non-trained pilot, but it also relies heavily on the concept of "emergency" in aviation, in which everything else is put on hold and everyone else gets out of the way.

It has basically nothing to do with driving a car.

First, the sky is large - "Big Sky Theory" is the term for it, and it generally means that you can fly around however and wherever you want without hitting anyone. Yes, there are controlled airspace segments, various levels for flying around, but the reality is that if you just ignored all of that and flew a plane from A to B, you wouldn't hit anyone (almost always). It breaks down a bit around airports, and there have been the occasional "plane A not talking to anyone and plane B not talking to anyone colliding" events, but they are exceedingly rare.

Second, large airports are going to be (almost by definition) controlled airspace, with ground response crews. And there are common airbands for radio communication. The Garmin system relies on these things.

If you hit the "Oh Crap!" button, yes. It will control an otherwise operational plane down to landing at some airport (I believe it prefers controlled airspace and emergency services, though I don't know details), and it will clear the road in front of it by setting the appropriate emergency transponder code and broadcasting prerecorded messages on the appropriate frequency that basically amount to "Get out of my way, I'm coming in for a landing at this airport on this runway." Which, for an incapacitated pilot, is absolutely the right thing to do. I'm fairly sure it won't clear the active runway, though. That's a problem for the humans on the ground.

But - literally everyone else in the sky will get out of their way, and ATC will ensure that. If there's an A380 on approach and this system is triggered near the airport, if ATC needs the A380 to get out of the way, they'll tell them to go around and go hold somewhere until the Cirrus is dealt with.

It's really a very, very different class of problem than self driving cars.

> I think this is just the usual goal post moving, if a machine does it then we decide it wasn't really dangerous for a machine to do it.

I've seen a lot of goalpost moving in the other direction on this one, to be honest - Self Driving Cars started as "never have an accident again!" and have slowly migrated to "look, you suck at driving, the robot sucks less, so stop bitching when the robot runs over grandma"

*runs over grandma who us trying to ilegally and suddenly cross the street right in front of the car

*runs into a stationary median which is literally bolted into the road, in broad daylight

*in the dark, on a highway

Have you seen the aerial pictures of the area? There's pretty clearly a path through the median that's inviting pedestrians to cross there.

Yep, turns out that's the sorta shit you have to deal with when operating a motor vehicle.

Is your bar that the environment should adapt to the tech rather than the other way around? If so, I’d encourage you to take a course in human factors engineering

It is so, so much easier to have a computer land a plane than to travel through a road infrastructure made for humans.

There are no roads, no obstacles, usually not even other planes constraining your plane for any autopilot situation. With autolanding, "other planes" might start becoming an issue, but it's still a vastly different level from the momentary and immediate coordination necessary between cars on public roadways.

Also, the operating environment is rather stable for aircraft. You won’t find thing’s like construction cones blocking off airspace that was once available. Even if airspace availability was changed, its not likely to create an immediate hazard (with some caveats like military testing ranges)

Autoland is impressive but it really is more equivalent to a system (in a car) that automatically applies the brakes than to a full self driving system.

Autopilot is simple and a solved problem. Self driving is not either.

Garmin Autoland is much more than "apply the brakes", as I understand. But it's still guiding your plane through an essentially empty environment, not something in the same ballpark as autonomous driving.

Well, more or less, the "apply the brakes" system still has to detect obstacles and calculate the optimal way to brake and so on. So it has to deal with dynamic environmenrs. Autoland, not so much.

I'd very much not want to be in an airplane whose landing strategy was "automatically apply the brakes". Navigating to an airport, lining up with the runway, and gently bringing down the plane seems significantly harder than auto-breaking.

> I think this is just the usual goal post moving, if a machine does it then we decide it wasn't really dangerous for a machine to do it.

I strongly disagree. Most machines are not capable of killing you because it makes a mistake.

Do you have an example of something humans did that could kill them that was automated completely that still can kill them, but generally does not anymore? An elevator is one example, but in the case of an elevator its a very bounded problem to solve, and even still hundreds die for unnecessary elevator deaths yearly.

Not to mention an elevator is not an entropic environment. A full self driving car would have to be able to deal with ice suddenly falling on the ground, people crashing around them, etc.

Fully automated train systems? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...

Not nearly as complex a problem as self driving cars, but I'd still rather not get hit by a train

My understanding of trains is that most of the safety advances have come from better signaling, not the automation of the trains themselves.

Yes, not nearly. Not anywhere close to the complexity needed for self driving cars. Trains run on closed, limited, well-signaled infrastructure, which (comparably) makes it fairly easy to "avoid other trains" (as long as the signaling, coordinated externally, works--if it doesn't the train is likely programmed to just stop until it does again).

You mean, like the entire rest of his comment? Garmin Autoland...

The Garmin Autoland is not equivalent to full self driving? That's like self parking which has existed for a while now. In any case planes are inherently orders of magnitude safer than cars to begin with due to the lack of obstacles/chaos.

It frustrates me to no end when people compare autolanding (even the Garmin kind), or worse, general autopilots, with self-driving cars.

Anyone who does that has either never traveled in an airplane (even just as a passenger), or just never observed and thought about the vastly different levels of interaction planes have with their environment.

Did you forget what you originally wrote? You said:

> Do you have an example of something humans did that could kill them that was automated completely that still can kill them, but generally does not anymore?

And I pointed out that the parent comment had already provided an example. Now you are arguing with me that the example given, about Garmin Autoland, isn't comparable to self-driving... Which isn't at all the example you asked for in the first place. Maybe focus and read a little more, write a little less. You'll be more easily understood.

> Do you have an example of something humans did that could kill them that was automated completely that still can kill them, but generally does not anymore?

My understanding from looking at research is that airplanes by experienced pilots rarely killed people... and they... still don't even when (partially) automated? There doesn't appear to be definitive evidence that autopilot is safer [2] as many of the innovations in safety have been conflated with procedural improvements.

In fact there are studies [1] that suggest autopilot is actually making flights unsafe as pilots are becoming complacent and airplanes do not flight themselves completely from point to point including taxiing.

In other words, no, plane automation is not an example as it does not satisfy the criteria of "generally does not" compared to the baseline of no automation.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001872088502700...

[2]https://www.eurocontrol.int/sites/default/files/publication/...

Try not to be so condescending, sheesh.

You wrote:

> The Garmin Autoland is not equivalent to full self driving?

This has nothing to do with your argument criteria of:

> Do you have an example of something humans did that could kill them that was automated completely that still can kill them, but generally does not anymore?

> Try not to be so condescending, sheesh.

I didn't mean that to be condescending out of turn, but if you are going to engage in an argument by posting a strong disagreement and an opinion:

> I strongly disagree. Most machines are not capable of killing you because it makes a mistake.

You cannot change the criteria for an example that you asked for simply because you don't feel like arguing that the example did or did not meet your criteria, nor can you do so simply because you didn't bother to read it carefully.

So no, I'm not being condescending out of turn, you really needed some correction on that. Sheesh.

> hundreds die for unnecessary elevator deaths yearly

Elevator deaths are extremely rare in industrialized countries (a couple dozen per year in the USA), and most are of people working on the elevator (e.g. accidentally falling down the elevator shaft), not passengers riding in an elevator. I think construction elevators are also quite a bit less safe than ordinary passenger elevators.

Typical elevators are one of the safest forms of transportation, substantially safer than stairs or ladders.

How is it the goalposts moving? Dangerous in the context of that question doesn't mean the solution is dangerous. Dangerous there means that a screwup would be dangerous. Or maybe where a 'simple' screwup would be dangerous for some subjective value of 'simple.'

Garmin autoland seems like a perfect example of something dangerous that's completely automated.

No point in comparing planes to cars.