In what way is requiring someone holding the title pilot to know how to manually fly a plane in case of disaster “rent-seeking”?

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caaqil 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Rent seeking has a specific definition and it fits here. When Autopilot does almost all the critical work needed (besides announcing frivolous stuff in carbon-based voice), and you have mandatory seats for humans to babysit the Autopilot mainly to satisfy some law, the term fits.

I am not convinced humans can do much better in "disasters" than Autopilot, despite the emotional stories to the contrary (survivorship bias is one hell of a drug).

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renehsz 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This take is so ignorant and provably false. I can't tell if you're trying to ragebait or if you actually believe this.

The autopilot does not do "almost all critical work", not even close. It only does some of the routine work (definitely not all of it). But the real critical work is when stuff goes wrong, dealing with emergencies.

The inherent complexity of aviation means that there are so many different failure modes and combinations thereof that no traditional system could ever handle all possibilities and edge cases.

I'm not going to claim that an AI could never do it. But as of right now, with current technology, well-trained pilots are absolutely critical to safety in even the most advanced airliners.

Also, the survivorship bias argument runs against you. Most events where pilots save the day are completely invisible. Like catching an incorrect clearance, a misconfigured approach, dealing with a technical malfunction, etc.

And even when disasters happen, it is very rare that simply engaging the autopilot would have saved the day. In fact, there are plenty of examples where the opposite is the case, and dropping to a lower level of automation would, in hindsight, have been better.

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caaqil 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Your first sentence would lead one to believe that you have some substantial evidence to demonstrate the ignorance and falsehood you identified. It's impressive that you are regurgitating the same formulaic-template set of cliches that boil down to "X is so complex bro, how can you even?".

Note that I never claimed aviation relies on AI right now, most of the Autopilot systems are deterministic automation systems, but the original point stands regardless.

	▲	cyberax 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As someone studying for a pilot license, your take is literally ridiculous. You should perhaps look at all the crashes where the autopilot stalled the aircraft on approach due to incorrect settings.

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ikety 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Really? Do autopilots diagnose threatening situations in the main cabin? Understand something unexpected happening on the ground? Visually diagnose situations? Properly identify threat levels?

It's genuinely worrying to me to see statements like this. As engineers, we of all people should know that there's 1 billion variables that could go wrong and another 1 billion we aren't even aware of yet...