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Joby Aviation have demoed their self-flying AI tech, by having a converted Cessna fly from the US West to East coast 100% autonomously. (www.jobyaviation.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/futurology@futurology.today
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"The aircraft, a converted Cessna Caravan, performed autonomous taxiing, takeoffs, route navigation, and landings under remote supervision from Joby’s Autonomy Headquarters in California and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, up to 2,323 miles away. The journey demonstrated the operational capabilities of Joby’s autonomy technology across a range of environments, supporting applications in commercial freight, medical transport, disaster response, and defense logistics."

We can see 2 ways future air travel may get much cheaper now that electric powered flight is becoming a reality for smaller/mid-sized planes. Cheap fuel (electricity) & much lower staffing costs thanks to self-flying tech.

Will there one day be an airline that is 100% electric and only self-flying? Probably. This strikes me as a great option for people who live in more sparsely populated areas. They are not economical for the big airlines, but they may be for an all-electric self-flying airline.

Joby Completes First-Ever Fully Autonomous Flight Across the United States

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[–] 16 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Unacceptable.

I have a pilot license and about 90 hours of logged flight time. Single and multi engine (VFR, tho I completed the IFR training in a simulator, just couldn't afford to go for the real IFR rating).

I will NEVER in my entire fucking LIFE step foot on an aircraft not piloted by a real person. Nor a commercial airliner not piloted by at least two real people.

I don't give a fuck how good any real or hypothetical tech gets.

There needs to be trained crew that can handle emergencies that go far off-script.

There need to be flesh and blood people that will lock in with every fiber of their being to save the lives of their passengers, their crew, and themselves, and make it home to their friends and families, if the need arises.

There need to be meat-based failsafes for when electrical power ceases.

Same goes for ATC.

I'm ALL for improving real, proven effective autonomous systems in aircraft. It's insane, in an awesome way, how airliners can land themselves in near zero visibility. WE DON'T NEED NEURAL BULLSHIT FOR THIS.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Not every plane carries people of course. And neural networks aren't all like LLMs. They can be entirely deterministic and can be trained in tons of simulated environments. There's no reason it's inherently worse than any other algorithm.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    pretty sure you don't want a cargo airliner crashing into your home.

    and I don't give a single fuck about the particulars of whatever the shit "ai" this company is using. Hard fucking no. Full stop.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    My point is that neural networks are already in use in modern planes, exactly what you called tried and tested before. Those applications can be a far cry from what you know as "AI". This stuff has existed for decades now.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I haven't flown since ADS-B was implemented so I could very well be ignorant here.

    What's an example of a neural network based system on, say, a modern passenger airliner?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Turns out I need to eat my words a little bit here. Airbus does have a plane that uses computer vision to take off and land, and taxi on the ground. And there's systems to visually detect other planes in the sky to help with collision avoidance. But they're not in passenger airliners yet because when the regulations were written decades ago, neural networks weren't big yet so it apparently says that every line of code needs to be directly traced back to a requirement, which is hard to do with weights. This is being revamped as far as I can tell, but not just yet.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 month ago

    It's only a matter of time until AI will be a better driver, pilot, captain and operator of any other machine you can think of. These systems are already good and they will only keep getting better. This is the worst they'll ever be. It doesn't mean that they'll ever be flawless but the bar to reach is better-than-humans and that's not a very high bar. Waymo and Tesla FSD are probably past that already or for the very least will soon be.

    Of course one can still refuse to step in a vehicle not operated by a human but at some point this becomes equivalent to knowingly stepping into the objectively more dangerous vehicle purely out of stubbornness.

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