
The rise of mostly-autonomous systems - yoav_hollander
https://blog.foretellix.com/2016/04/23/the-rise-of-mostly-autonomous-systems/
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awinter-py
we're already in this regime for airline pilots and (anecdotally) the results
aren't great; the french airbus that went down over the ocean a few years ago
was because of pilot error after an emergency condition (icing) disabled the
autopilot.

I don't know if that's the _typical_ case for autopilot tagging in its human,
but it seems difficult to motivate and train experts who will only work 0.5%
of the time. Expertise comes from experience.

Unless the pilots are required to be in the simulator the whole time the
autopilot is running the plane, which would be interesting and cool.

We also have no idea of how fast autonomous systems will 'evolve' (with
programmer help at first) and 'learn' once authorized to roam free. For their
constrained domains, I suspect they'll be up to 'expert' performance pretty
quickly; plus the rules will change as reaction times go down, attention per
vehicle improves, and communications improve.

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jakub_h
Then again, is a system that works 99.5% of the time and delegates stuff to
humans 0.5% of the time more or less reliable than a system that relies 100%
on humans, with their microsleeps, inattention, mistakes etc.? Has air travel,
e.g., become mostly less or mostly more reliable by means of automation?

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awinter-py
Hmm -- the question shouldn't be 100% human vs 0.5% human, the question is
0.5% human vs 0% human. Can somebody helicopter into a new situation and make
a decision quickly about what to do.

Flight may be a bad example because the time constraints are so short.
Changing the scenario to an automated fedex truck lost on a rural road, the
truck can pull over and wait a few minutes for help. In this case the solution
probably isn't to tag in an expert but rather to call the delivery recipient
for directions (same as a human driver would do).

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thinkingkong
This is so spot on. Before were able to automate away all this work we'll
augment peoples abilities with really smart tools. This concept will end up
not necessarily destroying entire job sectors but their job definition will be
dramatically different, in the same way a computer used to be a room full of
people doing math.

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ArkyBeagle
But the story of why people have jobs they hate - if they have jobs at all -
may need a villain . You can't ignore narrative reasoning, no matter how
flawed it is.

