I watched the lord of the ring movies this weekend for the first time. Extended versions with my friends.

Wtf is wrong with people who name their company, possibly their life's work, after the evil eye of the big bad evil guy?

That’s because this news site is owned by a multinational company, which owns several other publications. They sell advertising and not reform

No they didn't.

Later, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg the Federal Aviation Administration had brought on Palantir, Thales SA, and Air Space Intelligence to compete for the SMART contract. Palantir then released a statement to investors confirming the company was contracted by the FAA to “provide a data analytics tool that will help advance the agency’s modernization objectives for aviation safety.”

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?

Self-driving cars, buses, trains. Robots on the sidewalks. Guess I’m just staying inside forever.

Costs money right? There is money for wars only.

But how would Sam Altman and the other tech fascists benefit from that?

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.

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.

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 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!

Each day, about 100-120 people die in car crashes in America.

Over 45,000 planes fly in America every day, and over 5000 are in the air at any given moment. With a crash rate of 1 out of a thousand, we'd be having multiple plane crashes, with thousands of people killed, every day. One plane crash could easily match or surpass that daily car crash number, and we'd be having multiple plane crashes per day.

1 out of a thousand? I'd never fly again. NOBODY would ever fly again.

Sarcasm:

But think of the insurance people! Look at how many insurances are waiting to be denied and robbed!

More importantly, we can justify every other profit increase, because our economies are built on literal exploitation just as they did a couple hundred years prior!

Modern exploiting problems require modern idol solutions.

Even further: the biggest problem with AI and thus the biggest decider on its suitability or not for something is that its distribution of failure in terms of consequence is uniform rather than it being more likely to err in ways with few or less grevious consequences than in ways with more or worse consequences.

In other words, unlike humans who activelly try and avoid making the nastiest and deadly mistakes, when AI fails, it can fail just as easilly in the most horrible and deadly ways as it can in the most minor of ways.

That's why you have lots of instances of LLMs giving what for humans are obviously dangerous advice like telling people to put glue on pizza to make it look good or those with suicidal thoughts to kill themselves - unlike humans AI has no mechanism to detect "obviously dangerous" on an output it's about to produce and generate a different output instead.

This is why using AI to generate fluff filling for e-mails is fine but it's not fine in systems were errors can easilly cost lives.

Invest in rail

"you're absolutely right! I have revised my response, here are some better instructions..."

Revisions unclear... A second plane has struck a skyscaper.

Where are the Maglev Bullet Trains we were promised?

So AI can kill people there as well?

Also over America, even of they don't intend to land.

Mayday mayday mayday, we need to land immediately, but before we can do that, we need a python script that reverses the order of items in a linked list.....

I mean it feels like this is one of things that would benefit with automation, but because it is very hard problem we still use people do it.

The problem I'm having is the TV show host that is now running transportation thinks fucking chat bots have what it takes.

If they just limited our freedom to travel, people would get suspicious.

I'm all for automation if it works and if it improves safety but as far as I know they haven't proven that yet. I'd like to see an AI air traffic controller running in a simulation for many many years of simulation time first before we would even begin to talk about implementing it in real hardware.

Counterpoint: just look at the Air Canada crash that recently happened where a controller let a fire truck cross in the path of a landing aircraft.

Planes may have all this technology but that only involves what's happening in the air, not on the ground.

Now maybe all ground crew could have vehicles equipped with transponders and tracked as well, but there are also incidents of people randomly ending up on the runways / taxiways, or animals, or non airport vehicles.

AI is fine for this... assuming we're talking about a specifically trained machine learning model that is actually made to handle ATC and not just shoehorning an LLM into a job it was never intended to do.

AI is a pretty big catch-all term. If they mean specially designed and trained deep learning neural nets, maaaaybe it'll be okay. If they mean typical LLMs we're straight up fucked.

I just saw an ad for using ChatGPT to "come up with new recipes and baking ideas"

Yeah I'm sure having a bunch of people decide to eat whatever a hallucinating AI comes up with isn't going to be dangerous at all...

Bold of you to assume there is a future

So Trump will be the Simpsons for fucking stupidity.

Ooooooh, I like trains! But uhhhh, lets skip East Palestine Ohio......

Don't worry, it'll get to rail soon enough :)

Do you live within 50km of an airport ?

But if you flew you wouldn’t have to be on one of these crashing airplanes

A plane can still fall on your head.

Forget flying, you'll be getting Donnie Darkoed in your bedroom.

Yes.

I’m not sure I’d trust ATC to be fully automated using AI

When generative AI can't even answer simple questions correctly, it feels like maybe it's too imprecise a tool to trust with this level of necessary precision.

And it's a shame. The US has the money to pay these people.

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)

The TV show host is talking about using fucking chat bots, that we started calling AI.

US doesn't have money to automate most of the manual bookkeeping that is done in most ATC. There's no way it'll shell out for smarter RADAR and shit

AI still to untrustworthy to manage that, having 1 atc isnt enough even with AI.

Yeah it's not great how far I had to scroll to find someone pointing out that "AI tools for planning" and "Putting an LLM in an air traffic controller's seat" are not the same thing.

That's true with any form of automation. People crash because they have cruise control on too.

The issue is YOU are talking about REAL AI - statistical analysis and modeling leading to decision making with increasingly better fits.

The Transportation Secretary is most CERTAINLY vaguely referring to "that Claude thing that can do anything", and it's a series of plane crashes waiting to happen.

Or they could just hire more people so they aren’t perpetually understaffed and over worked. This is a safe proven method that has worked for decades, no unproven tech from questionable ai businesses needed.