The ATC told them to enter the runway because they were confused or distracted due t overwork.
No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
People are saying automation could handle a significant portion of the routine things allowing humans to handle the more complex/finicky issues.
Even if automation could handle 10% of the most common situations it would be a huge boon. In reality its probably closer to 50%.
There's unfortunately an alertness problem WRT automated systems.
If the reason you have the human there is to handle the unusual cases, you run the real risk that they just aren't paying attention at critical moments when they need to pay attention.
It's pretty similar to the problem with L3 autonomous driving.
Probably the sweet spot is automation which makes clear the current set of instructions on the airport which also red flags when a dangerous scenario is created. I believe that already exists, but it's software that was last written in 1995 or so.
Regardless, before any sort of new automation could be deployed, we need slack for the ATC to be able to adopt a new system. That's the biggest pressing problem. We could create the perfect software for ATC, but if the current air traffic controllers are all working overtime and doing a job designed for 3 people rather than one, they simply won't have the time to explore and understand that new system. It'll get in the way rather than solve a problem. More money is part of the solution here, but we also need a revamped ATC training program which can help to fill the current hole.
> The ATC told them to enter the runway because they were confused or distracted due t overwork.
Very possibly. It will be interesting what comes from the investigation.
> No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
I’m asking if it would have solved even the current situation. The truck presumably saw the red light, and was asking to cross. Would traffic control have said no if more had been automated and if so, what automation would fix this? Unless we are supposing the truck would be autonomously driven and refuse to proceed when planes are landing, in which case, maybe, though that’s not really ATC automation anymore.
an automated system that could check if a plane is about to land on a runway and show some kind of alert or red light is hardly a stretch of the imagination
Thank you for providing your aviation knowledge to this discussion. What a classic example of tech people thinking that because they're smart, every other industry must be dumb and they can just jump in and fix it.
I also do not like this persistent tone of “everyone else is stupid; software would easily fix it” that pops up so often. Not all problems are easy to fix with some code.
To be clear, though, I don’t even have significant aviation knowledge. But this isn’t hard to learn about. That’s part of what irks me so much about this tone. It’s not just “I’m so smart” it’s “I’m so confident that you’re dumb that I don’t need to know anything about the domain you’re working in to know better than you”. Someone could ask ChatGPT why airports don’t have stoplights to stop traffic from crossing the runway and it would reveal the existence of this system.
Yes, in fact I had considered adding your same thought to my initial comment. It's not impossible that a smart tech person might be able to improve the existing systems. The problem is the arrogance of not even checking what existing systems there might be, as if obviously they'd be too backwards to have any.
Something like that. It feels a bit different because it’s less about overestimating one’s knowledge/ability and more about underestimating the complexity of domains outside one’s expertise. But yeah. Very similar.
Me too, but I don’t like referring to Dunning-Kruger ever for multiple reasons. There are perfectly good labels like cockiness, arrogance, ignorance, presumptuousness, and wrongheaded. ;)
There are many issues with DK, and the paper’s widely misunderstood. For one, the primary figure demonstrates a positive correlation between confidence and competence, so according to DK’s own paper, high confidence is not an indicator of incompetence, contrary to popular belief. The paper also measured things in a very funny way (by having participants rank themselves against other people of unknown skill), and it measured only very simple things (like basic grammar, and ability to get a joke), and it only polled Cornell undergrads (no truly incompetent people), and there were a tiny number of participants receiving extra credit (might exclude the As and Fs in the class). Many smart people have come to the conclusion that DK is a statistical artifact of the way they did their experiment, not a real cognitive bias. Some smart people have pointed out that DK is probably popular because it’s really tempting to believe - we like the idea of arrogant people getting justice. The paper also primes the reader, telling them what to believe even though the title isn’t truly supported by the data. It’s an interesting read that I think would not pass today’s publication criteria.
Agreed, but I see this in every industry. And though it's certainly arrogant on some level, I think of it in a more positive light: people are generally optimistic and want to solve problems.
My grandfather had a rule at his business for 55-ish years: we welcome your ideas and suggestions, but not for the first year. You spend that time learning our processes, decisions behind them, pain points, areas that need improvement, etc. You also spend that time doing the work and hearing from your colleagues. Then you can (hopefully) make informed suggestions. That's not possible in every situation, but I like the intent.
I meant something in-vehicle for ground vehicles, like an extremely simple extrapolation of current velocity and the extremely predictable trajectory of a plane, instead of depending on going back and forth over radio asking a very busy fallible human, but sure
even my cheap car has geofencing and automatic braking
I've worked on avionics professionally and I haven't crashed any of my planes yet...
“These lights … turn red in response to traffic, providing direct, immediate alerts without the need for input from controllers”.
It will be interesting to see what the report says. Did the light system not function? Did they override it? Do they ignore it consistently?
> geofencing and automatic braking
I’m not at all sure I want emergency vehicles to be blocked like this. And if they can override then it’s no different. They didn’t roll onto the runway on accident.
> I've worked on avionics professionally and I haven't crashed any of my planes yet...
In an ideal world this would be like rail traffic, where the runway would be 'locked' (red signal) due to the landing plane, and the fire engine would have to explicitly request an override to cross the locked runway, and importantly, this process has to be _rare_. If it's something that's done 5000 times a day, it'll be normalized. Everyone involved should be aware of the dangers of traversing a 'locked' runway.
Could be. I am currently scrolling the comments on the new Apple displays and the gatekeeping "Only rEaL ProoOOOs should have any achual use for frame rates over 60. Ur just lowly a gamer. Shoo!" attitude is through the roof there.
I lived plenty of my life prior to the cell phone era (born early 80s).
I do not have the same feeling you seem to have about photos from this era. Some are fine, sure, but looking back on them, most of them are very bad photos and most do not capture anything close to what I'd call an emotional feeling.
I would go so far as to say 99% of the photos from my life prior to 2000s really suck, like really badly. Some also degrade visually and lose their impact over time.
Since you couldn't be sure what you caught more than often what is captured is poorly framed, blurry, weird, poorly timed, and often left out a lot of stuff that was actually going on. You also had to try and be super selective because each photograph had a real tangible cost.
Conversely, I find being able to take many photos in quick succession and across a long period of time at a very high clarity allows me to select a photo that most closely matches my feeling in those moments at that event.
Even more so with AI photos. Although many models cannot do this well, their abilities get better each day and can allow you to compose or edit/modify a photo in such a way that matches your internal feelings rather than the blandness of what is essentially a random photo of random stuff that may or may not convey an emotion anywhere near to what I was feeling or remember feeling in that moment.
Yet another boring, repetitive, unhelpful article about why AI is bad. Did the 385th iteration of this need to be written by yet another person? Why did this person think it was novel or relevant to write? Did they think it espouses some kind of unique point of view?
Most of the people working at Ars are the exact same people who have been working there for the better part of their entire existence (source: me) Most of them _are_ experts in their fields, and most are vastly more qualified in their fields than pretty much anyone else publishing online (both now and 20 years ago).
It seems that _certain kinds of individuals_ have had rose-colored glasses on about pretty much everything online, but for Ars especially for some reason.
They detest change in a publication that covers the reality of actual life and technology, rather that commit suicide and stay covering stuff the same way they did in 1997—which 8 people total want to read (and not pay for, by the way).
Ars has been operating at an exceptionally high level for their entire history and have outlasted many other flashes-in-the-pan which are now relegated to the dust bin of history.
Is Ken still actively involved? He seems to appear to clarify something and then disappear into the background until the next major change (I expect the article about this to be bylined to him, as is appropriate).
Specifically the dynamic analysis skills could get a really big boost with this MCP server, I also wonder if this MCP server could be rephrased into a pure skill and not come with all the context baggage.
No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
People are saying automation could handle a significant portion of the routine things allowing humans to handle the more complex/finicky issues.
Even if automation could handle 10% of the most common situations it would be a huge boon. In reality its probably closer to 50%.
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