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'Autonomous flight is closer than you think': Reliable Robotics CEO
Technology is making gains in autonomous flight. Ongoing work with Cessna 208 Caravan shows promise. (finance.yahoo.com) Más...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
No pilot/pilots=no passengers!
. . . then, by all means, enjoy your walk to Honolulu when in 2040.
Wholeheartedly agree! It’s not whiz bang tech fun...it’s LIVES! Mine, yours, your parents, your children. How many proponents would put their own loved ones on a test bed for this kind of thing???
They don't expect anyone on a testbed. But, just as the X-1A was only for the brave, people were lined up for the Concord 20 years later and technology moves 10X faster today. Just look at the line of people waiting to get a ride into space. People will fly on the product that's out there. That's been well proven. There are plenty of people still today who refuse to fly who I do look down on because I'm up there. Feel free to join them whenever you wish.
Testbed = real live passengers on pilotless plane. Concord had pilots. Duh!
underestimating the exponential advance of technology is common. 100 years ago there were many people who spoke as you did about flying in planes in general; "If God would have wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings." The question is not 'IF' Passenger planes will be autonomously flown, it is 'WHEN'. It certainly may be much farther in the future than some postulate, but it will eventually happen. As computer 'pilots' advance in capability, there will be a breakeven point at which accidents 'caused' by computer pilots are reduced to below the number caused by human pilot error. There certainly will be people uncomfortable with this concept, just as there are people that would never trust an autonomously driven automobile. But observations indicate that many people will accept the new technology readily. Those people who don't... Will eventually age and die, being replaced by those who grew up with machine-intelligent autonomous capabilities.
You seem to have missed my point that I happen to know about software and machine learning and am warning that there is a huge remaining obstacle that even the best machine learning systems have yet to solve, namely, handing unforeseen situations. Perhaps new research will overcome this obstacle, but that hasn't happened yet.
That step will be solved in time Mike. The natural progression will be humans monitoring autonomous aircraft for just such unforeseen situations until operational experience shows it can be curtailed or ended. At that point, there is no need for a human in the loop that is more likely to cause an accident than prevent an accident.
Perhaps you missed my point. It is an error to think that machine-intelligence must be developed to handle ALL unforeseen situations in order to be applied into public serving roles, such as autonomous aircraft. They only need to be developed to the point where, in practice, they handle the sum of ALL flying challenges (foreseen and unforeseen) BETTER than human beings. We are in the middle of a long transition from human-only piloting to autonomous-only piloting. During this transition period, piloting responsibility is being transitioned from human pilot to machine-intelligent pilot. As each year goes by, machine-intelligence takes over more of the piloting responsibilities. The problem we are beginning to face is that human beings, once relieved of a majority of piloting responsibilities, begin a performance degradation that makes them much less effective at performing the piloting roles that remain for them. We have seen many accidents where this was the cause, and we see it in autonomous driving situations as well. At some point in the future (granted, it may not be for decades), a human being in the cockpit will offer no additional assurances of flight safety. At best, they will serve no purpose. At worst, they will interfere with the automated system and be the primary cause of accidents (we’ve seen examples already). When this transition happens, human pilots will be eliminated on commercial airliner flights. All in response to data that shows they no longer provide any real value to the passengers.
This technology is cool, and will help with things like Amazon using drones to deliver packages, but people should never get on board an autonomous aircraft.