Aviation is different because their rent-seeking is enforced by the required legal hedging. I'm not sure the same incentive structure exists in the software side of things.
In other words, we might need to find some hobbies.
In other words, we might need to find some hobbies.
I am not convinced humans can do much better in "disasters" than Autopilot, despite the emotional stories to the contrary (survivorship bias is one hell of a drug).
The autopilot does not do "almost all critical work", not even close. It only does some of the routine work (definitely not all of it). But the real critical work is when stuff goes wrong, dealing with emergencies.
The inherent complexity of aviation means that there are so many different failure modes and combinations thereof that no traditional system could ever handle all possibilities and edge cases.
I'm not going to claim that an AI could never do it. But as of right now, with current technology, well-trained pilots are absolutely critical to safety in even the most advanced airliners.
Also, the survivorship bias argument runs against you. Most events where pilots save the day are completely invisible. Like catching an incorrect clearance, a misconfigured approach, dealing with a technical malfunction, etc.
And even when disasters happen, it is very rare that simply engaging the autopilot would have saved the day. In fact, there are plenty of examples where the opposite is the case, and dropping to a lower level of automation would, in hindsight, have been better.
Note that I never claimed aviation relies on AI right now, most of the Autopilot systems are deterministic automation systems, but the original point stands regardless.
You should perhaps look at all the crashes where the autopilot stalled the aircraft on approach due to incorrect settings.
I didn't say that an autonomous airliner could never be built. With more technological progress it might become feasible at some point despite the immense complexity.
It's genuinely worrying to me to see statements like this. As engineers, we of all people should know that there's 1 billion variables that could go wrong and another 1 billion we aren't even aware of yet...
Instead, they are the weakest part on that market.
In general, it is of high quality.