I wonder how many plane crashes it'll take before this changes.

If at all.

Actually no them too. Peter Theil is shockingly stupid and crazy. He believes it'll work and if it doesn't he's so special nothing bad can happen to him

Its simpler than that. They are prioritizing the "economy" over anything else, which leads to this type of decision making. The shortage is fixed for less money than if they hired more people, the money goes to AI companies propping them up further, and the "stock market" continues to climb.

Its an entirely flawed way of thinking and living and that's what needs to change. Right now the largest impact on changing this is simply older generations dieing off, as many are too old to change their entire moral system.

What's the worst thing that could happen??

We will certainly find out. In the meantime, I'll drive.

with so little ATC already as well.

It's still appropriate to blame Reagan, funnily enough.

Oh, he definitely did. But you can never underestimate the power of ANY politician to fuck things up WORSE.

It's kind of their superpower.

Hi. I dont know shit about flying or the demands of personnel in a control tower (especially at a place like atl). I'm also fairly anti-AI for various reasons. But it seems to me, from ground level and with a view of the trees, that AI would be better at juggling all of the data and variables of planes in the sky, compared to a moron like me. Given that you're a pilot, can you help me understand why that's not the case?

Costs money right? There is money for wars only.

That's crazy talk!

Perhaps one could even build a second FAA, to create more opportunities for training for civilian ATCs… but that would make Oklahoma very sad.

the pipeline to ATC is very long, and competitive. like 2+years to become one if you are lucky to get into the program in the first place.

What if this is the upgrade?

If the AI was to be trained on explicitly and only information relevant to air traffic control it would likely have very deep knowledge - there’s not mountains of misinformation and people’s personal musings about air traffic control. And as long as a session is refreshed often enough it should never start mentally degrading.

AI is unethical for a lot of reasons and I think we are rushing into this and I don’t trust the people doing it and I hate this time line, but in another time line where sane and smart people are in charge and AI had strict guard rails and security measures an AI could absolutely do the bulk of this job. I’d still want humans around incase of emergencies or to help a pilot who’s in need of information, but the logistics of the job? An AI can be REALLY good at logistics

HAL-9000 if it was made today

Well, at least the AI seemed sincere in their apology.

Apparently you don't want to fly over the US either.

But who controls the flight paths over oceans? Could this change affect those flight paths too?

It's a pity. I've had many good exchanges with tribal members there that I'd love to meet in person. But the ones I've chatted with are more remote then I can probably get to (several days driving), and the settler-colonial attitude in the the other areas stinks.

It used to be such an esteemed profession too.

Planes have had "Ai" for decades, it was called autopilot. This is for air traffic controllers. They sit in the tower and basically coordinate all the traffic on around the airport. Why this is important, look at the crash at laguadia(airport in NYC I'm likely spelling wrong). Basically fire crew wanted to cross run towards an unrelated incident, plane wanted to land. Atc told fire crew they were clear and told the plane they were clear to land... On same runway. Plane crashed into water truck of fire crew causing severe damage to both vehicles. "luckily" only the 2 pilots of the plane lost their lives, it could of been so much worse.

MAYBE I could see a use of Ai. Currently their are sensors to detect where planes and land vehicles are but imagine if an llm could interpret the talk on the comms and detect if two statements could result in a collision. Especially if there are multiple Atc officers active. Like Tom tells one plane to land on runway 22 and Lucy tells another plane to land on runway 22 and Tom and Lucy don't hear eachother. Or if a single officer tells a plane to land on runway 30 but they were 10 minutes out. A truck to refill the food/drinks asks to cross runway 30 when the plane is only 20 seconds out. I could see the Atc officer forgetting about the plane and granting clearance.

Ai logs all these orders, reading the sensors for current situation and activates visual and audio alarms that two orders may conflict. Officer could tell the plane to go around, maybe cost some fuel and time for a false alarm but potentially save hundreds of lives. Maybe Ai doesn't detect conflicting orders and it's up to the human officers to notice. We are now in the same situation we are currently. Now, if you try to eliminate the human element and just rely on Ai people will die in many accidents.

They’d never take off from a public airport how lowborn

Biden

Liberals.

Well we have already had deaths due to the current crunch (and not paying them) of us air traffic controllers.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/laguardia-collision-air-traffic-control-ntsb-9.7140479

And who was blamed for those? Oh yeah the traffic controllers! So when grok starts seeing how many 737s can fit in the same physical space, it will be the controllers fault. As you can imagine this will make those controllers want to quit, meaning more pressure to use shit like AI tools.

Fortunately the world is going to run out of aviation fluid next week so we won't have to find out.

If it's the ATC then it's their fault, if it's AI then it's no one's.

Obviously it's the DEI

The remaining humans in ATC for "not having supervised the AI agents appropriately", of course!

And some politicians will get off scot free with the "WeLl It WaSnT Us iN CoNtRoL oF De aI!1!" Line.

But that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make

But look at the PROFITS! TOTALLY worth it!