alt Hacker News> I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Replies
Being responsible for knowing what to do when autopilot fails has pretty good job security actually. The job might be babysitting, but no one wants to be in a flying tube without a captain that can at least let us know when we’re all going to die
You’ve never been in a cockpit while a plane has been flying have you?
> No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Wow. You clearly have zero idea of what a pilot's job is, and it shows.
You are also severely underestimating how much work and regulation would be required to replace pilots. And this work can be undone in a flash the first time automation messes up.
Also note that plane automation heavily relies on sensors. Many plane accidents were caused by faulty sensors even with humans in the loop.
is there a reason to think swe won't become the same? llm pilot, accountability guy, and has enough skill to manually pilot in extraneous situations.
do you actually understand how modern airplanes work in practice or is this just based off the fact that an airplane can land by itself?
Airplane automation has shown to be rather bad at diagnosing what is wrong and coming up with a workaround.
For example, engine falls off. The automation doesn't know that happened, it just sees various problems like the hydraulic pressure falls, and for some reason the engine thrust went to zero.
When I was at Boeing, an incident was recounted to me where the autopilot glitched and rolled the plane over into a vertical dive. It was going so fast it entered "separation", where the airflow no longer flows over the flight controls. In other words, the pilots were just along for the ride.
But the pilot figures, since we're dead anyway, let's try lowering the landing gear and see if it slows the jet down. He did, and it ripped the doors off and bent the gear back, but it slowed enough that the flight controls could get a "bite" and the pilots were able to regain control and landed safely.