After the first few avoidable crashes, entire countries will refuse to fly to America.
Not The Onion
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
I'm curious what this system actual is. From the article quotes it sounds more like prediction algorithms for future delays "seeing 45 days out", for instance.
That would not be a bad thing. I doubt this is LLMs.
Uh yeah, any travel I might do will be by train.
Ooooooh, I like trains! But uhhhh, lets skip East Palestine Ohio......
Cause USAian air traffic control isnt already enough of a shit show?
I find myself disagreeing with Lemmy more and more these days, but ATC seems like one of those things that could really benefit from AI. I don't like generative AI being pushed into everything these days either, but a well designed AI can take in all of the things an air traffic controller has to manage and identify things a controller might miss.
Of course this is a money making operation which isn't ideal because capitalism, but I'm fairly certain this will either reduce or maintain existing incident rates while making it more efficient
Honestly, I'm not sure what's worse: the current state of things (severely overworked air traffic controllers because there's huge shortages), or using AI for it.
The plane that crashed into a fire truck at LGA recently was mostly due to overworked ATC. One controller was working both ground and tower, with queues of five or six planes needing to land. He needed to continue working for half an hour after the crash too, because nobody else was around to take over.
I'm not sure I'd trust ATC to be fully automated using AI, but AI tools could probably help controllers by reducing the amount of work they have to do. For example, smarter RADAR, recommendations for what to call next, more proactive warnings for if anything dangerous is likely to occur, etc.
Another part of the reason that crash occurred was because the firetrucks didn't have transponders for the system that is supposed to be aware of all things that are, or about to be, on a particular part of the airfield.
If they had had them, this would have triggered with the system thats hooked into the radar detection of oncoming aircraft, that the ATCs did have, it would have started barking out warnings.
(ASDE-X is the specific system I'm talking about)
So... if you just ... plug in AI... to hardware sensors that dont actually exist... well they're gonna miss things too.
Kinda like how... it doesn't matter how much compute power Elon crams into a Tesla, the Autopilot based on visual cameras alone will be inferior to an Autopilot that also uses LIDAR.
(My source on this is youtuber Captain Steeeve, retired pilot, goes through the latest NTSB report)
You're absolutely right!
(sorry)
Its ok lol, this whole catastrophe was so complex that the NTSB ... seems like it had to redo its whole report, or maybe a better way to say it would be that their initial report was incomplete, and the later report hsd a loooot more, and some just actually different analysis and conclusions.
There were many, many contributing factors to this.
ATC was overworked, made a mistake.
Later tried to correct it, but it likely wasn't heard because a huge truck hauling water... well its diesel engines spooling up are very loud, inside the cabin.
Systems... didn't specifically fail, they just didn't work correctly, due to not being fully implemented.
The drivers of the truck could have paid attention to the red strip of lights infront of them, instead of ignoring them - its possible that if they asked ATC 'hey why are the DONT GO lights on, ATC?', the ATC might have looked at the system controlling that and seen 'oh, the lights are red because a plane will be landing in 45 seconds'.
Fustercluck.
AI still to untrustworthy to manage that, having 1 atc isnt enough even with AI.
Probability models are not able to do anything complicated that requires constant adjustment and novel thinking and problem solving.
"Ai" is literally just probability models.
Jesus.
Oh god please no.