Agreed. I think thats a really fun way to test out Claude's ability to perform an abstract task it's probably not trained on, was nice to read

yeah, I think GP misunderstood the nature of a thing like this. It's what hackers do, we play with things. Nobody is suggesting we replace the pilots in real planes with claude, certainly not OP

There's also the issue that when something goes wrong, many people will never trust an autopilot again. Just look at how people have reacted to a Waymo running over a cat in a scenario where most humans would have made the same error. There's now many people calling for self-driving cars to never be allowed on roads and citing that one incident.

There are soooo many pilot decisions that AI is nowhere near making. Managing a flight is more than flying. It is about making safety decisions during crisis, from deciding when to abort an approach to deciding when to eject a passenger. Sure, someone on the ground could make many of those decisions, but i prefer such things be decided by someone with literal skin in the game, not a beancounter or lawyer in an office

>never mind that most crashes are caused by humans, very rarely by technical issues going amok

Because humans are the fallback for all the scenarios that the tech cannot reliably cover. And my intuition says that the tech around planes is so heavily audited that only things that work with 99.999...% accuracy work will be left to tech.

That's so incredibly reductive, that I'd go ahead and call it plain wrong.

"Caused by a human" is the lowest tier, first base human instinct analysis of any accident, and as such, unless proven otherwise, can be discarded out of hand.

It comes down to: if a human mistake is capable of causing an accident, your system is badly designed because it assumes a part of the system known to be unreliable (a human) is always reliable.

The whole trick is designing systems that are safe despite humans being in the loop. Then you get to benefit from the advantages humans bring over machines without suffering the downsides.

Still those technological issues do happen, and in those situations it's good to have a human pilot in control. See for example Qantas Flight 72 - the autopilot thought aircraft was stalling, and sent the plane into a dive. It could have ended up very badly without human supervision.

> Don't think the autopilot can do that yet.

It absolutely can; it's called autoland[1]. In really bad visibility, pilots simply can't see the runway until too late, and most aerodromes which expect these conditions have some sort of autoland system installed. The most advanced ones will control every aspect of the plane from top-of-descent (TOD), flaps and throttle configuration, long and short final, gear down, flare, reverse thrust, and roll-out, all the way to a full stop on the runway. Zero pilot input needed.

And most of this was already available in the late 1970s. We have absolutely no need for LLM-based AI in aviation; traditional automation techniques have proven extremely powerful given how restricted the human domain of aviation already is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

Autopilots can. Both on airliners and small planes, although only landing on the latter as far as I know and it's only meant for emergencies. Airbus ATTOL is probably the most interesting of these in that it's visual rather than ILS (note that no commercial airliners are using this).