It's not incorrect to say that automated technologies aren't always better than human operators. But that's not the measure we need to use. The question is does the net failure rate increase or decrease? Say the automated technology fails 2x as much in unexpected failure cases, but halves typical failure rates?
Say an airline experiences 100 crashes a year due to unexpected failures, but 1,000 crashes a year due to expected failures (immense crash rates for any real airline, this is just an analogy). Using an automated technology might increase crashes from unexpected failures to 200, but reduce crashes due to expected failures down to 500. This is still a net decrease of 400 crashes. Assuming other things are equal, namely the severity of crashes, this is good outcome.
Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated flight crashing.
Also, I'm not sure how ML or AI relates to this. It's not mentioned in the article, and I'd be surprised if any part of this system makes use of machine learning or AI. At most, maybe parts of the flight control systems are tuned with AI. But even then I'd be surprised if that's the case - computer controlled flight controls has existed since the 1970s.
>Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated flight crashing.
In an analogy to self-driving cars...even if the math is sound, people will take issue until the technology is universally so far above a human driver that the accident rate is neglible.
I'm not sure about that. Even if the accident rate is half, that's still an immense gain - over 10,000 lives saved each year in the US. Even if it's equal (or slightly greater than equal), the productivity boost would be substantial. Do we really think that people with hour+ long commutes would reject a self driving car with half the accident rate of a human driver?
I don't know, probably not, but to your point about people's fear being irrational, I can see people strongly rejecting the idea of dying to a software glitch they don't understand.
Say an airline experiences 100 crashes a year due to unexpected failures, but 1,000 crashes a year due to expected failures (immense crash rates for any real airline, this is just an analogy). Using an automated technology might increase crashes from unexpected failures to 200, but reduce crashes due to expected failures down to 500. This is still a net decrease of 400 crashes. Assuming other things are equal, namely the severity of crashes, this is good outcome.
Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated flight crashing.
Also, I'm not sure how ML or AI relates to this. It's not mentioned in the article, and I'd be surprised if any part of this system makes use of machine learning or AI. At most, maybe parts of the flight control systems are tuned with AI. But even then I'd be surprised if that's the case - computer controlled flight controls has existed since the 1970s.