Since we’re going to be talking about automation quite a bit here, I found Sully’s take on automation in the cockpit to be quite relevant:
> “I’VE COME across a number of people over the years who think that modern airplanes, with all their technology and automation, can almost fly themselves. That’s simply not true. Automation can lower the workload in some cases. But in other situations, using automation when it is not appropriate can increase one’s workload. A pilot has to know how to use a level of automation that is appropriate.”
…
“Whether you’re flying by hand or using technology to help, you’re ultimately flying the airplane with your mind by developing and maintaining an accurate real-time mental model of your reality—the airplane, the environment, and the situation. The question is: How many different levels of technology do you want to place between your brain and the control surfaces? The plane is never going somewhere on its own without you. It’s always going where you tell it to go. A computer can only do what it is told to do. The choice is: Do I tell it to do something by pushing on the control stick with my hand, or do I tell it to do something by using some intervening technology?” [0]
[0] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, Jeffrey Zaslow
https://a.co/2iSmRDH
I’m going to pull another quote from that section that I think also supports the idea. There are specific cases cited in the book… I just don’t think copying an entire section of a book will be as helpful at getting the ideas out here:
> “Dr. Wiener[0] worried, and I agree, that the paradox of automation is that it often lowers a pilot’s workload when that load is already low. And it sometimes increases the workload in the cockpit when it is already high… For those who believe technology is the answer to everything, [he] would offer data to prove that isn’t the case. He said that automated airplanes with the highest technologies do not eliminate errors. They change the nature of the errors that are made. For example, in terms of navigational errors, automation enables pilots to make huge navigation errors very precisely… Dr. Wiener is not antitechnology, and neither am I. But technology is no substitute for experience, skill, and judgment.”[1]
[0] “Earl Wiener, Ph.D., a former Air Force pilot who is now retired from the University of Miami’s department of management science. He is renowned for his work in helping us understand aviation safety.”[1]
[1] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, Jeffrey Zaslow
https://a.co/gRNJtON
Automation is more interesting in how it can enhance human capabilities. Humans don't need a whole lot of help keeping the wings straight and level on a clear day. But they do need help landing the airplane in dense fog, and two humans and three computers working together can actually do that. The computers can't do it by themselves, the humans can't do it by themselves, but together, they can!
As a SRE, or what I'm going to term "Operations Automation Engineer" (because like DevOps or Systems Administrator, there's a treadmill of terminology), I have often automated myself out of my secondary responsibilities, the ones that take up the majority of my time. At Google, we liked to joke that "It's SRE's job to automate ourselves out of our jobs every 18 months", and I think that from the perspective of time, that was very true. Whatever we spent most of our time on eighteen months ago should be a trivial task today.
What I can't automate myself out of is my primary responsibility; Making sure that the site or service is up and available and making our customers happy. I can make constant improvements to that, with occasional backslides, but what I'm paid to do and feel comfortable with my job security is to make a reliable, trustworthy service. That's not going anywhere.
> But they do need help landing the airplane in dense fog, and two humans and three computers working together can actually do that. The computers can't do it by themselves, the humans can't do it by themselves, but together, they can!
This is not remotely true. Two humans can easily land in dense fog with instruments alone. If you can't then you shouldn't be flying a plane especially not one with passengers. To suggest otherwise is absurd.
In general, I don't understand the push of humans to want to replace everything we do with machines. What's the point? What's the end goal? We just sit in a vat of embalming fluid consuming media with a feeding tube while machines whir about? Why can't enough ever be enough for humanity?
As a controls engineer building factory automation, it's about letting humans do human things and robots do robotic things.
You don't want to have a human sticking their fingers in a grinder, or handling red-hot castings, or trying to install a washer on a dial table every 2.5 seconds for 8 hours straight, or attending the movement of a sewing machine within 1/8" for literal miles of seams sewn each day... those are all mind-numbing or dangerous things I've automated. But the machines can't efficiently understand when they're wearing out, they fault in a myriad of ways and need troubleshooting, they need someone to monitor the quality of incoming and outgoing product, keep them fed with parts, and to do other common-sense human tasks.
There are certainly things that people have tried to automate that didn't make sense. But there are a lot of things that haven't yet been automated which should be.
Adding a bit more context to this good post, the control algorithms are designed and developed around assumptions and an operational envelope deemed to be "normal".
An airplane is much more complicated from a systems perspective (but yet can be more easily automated from an operational POV). To make an airplane fly, there are dozens of control surfaces, very complex mechanical systems, and not to mention a greater degree of danger (i.e., explosions) and loss of life should these systems fail. Yet, when everything "works" within their engineered/designed parameters, we can construct control algorithms around these operational envelopes.
Also, at 10k feet in the air, there are rules that govern flight paths (overseen by controllers); radar and beacons that help keep planes on track; and most importantly much less traffic/congestion (as opposed to a bus or car).
This provides the pilots (and also sailors) the ability to automate their flight at steady-state. This is where it gets interesting. If a plane loses a control surface or a critical system fails, these controls systems will be pushed outside of their operational envelopes, and this is where a human takes over.
It's not a question of "if" but "when" things will fail....
The low-hanging fruit of straight and level flight is, I'd argue, appropriate for automation, but they need to get out of the way when the plane goes outside the normal operating envelope.
Whether these tools are just analog trim tabs that allow the stick to be adjusted so that a stable aircraft basically holds itself in straight-and-level flight, or complex fly-by-wire autopilot algorithms that keep an unstable aircraft in straight-and-level flight, taking the mundane, repetitive, mind-numbing workload of closing the loop between the six-pack of instruments and the sticks for hours on end. A pilot who has been watching the VSI and heading for three hours on a cross-country flight, tediously keeping the plane within 300 feet of its assigned flight level and ensuring that the passengers don't even perceive tiny changes in heading and attitude, or a trucker who has been driving their tractor-trailer cross-country for 60 hours in 7 days, holding an 8.5-foot-wide vehicle between a pair of 12-foot-wide lane lines, and adjusting the throttle up and down hills to keep their speed within a couple MPH of the speed limit, is going to be fatigued and when it comes time to deal with an emergency on landing or a sudden, unexpected brake check from a small car pulling in front of the truck, that fatigue has a cost.
There's a point where cruise control and autopilots can make these tasks safer, allowing pilots to keep ahead of the needs of aircraft, and allowing drivers to keep their eyes scanning the other vehicles, their mirrors, and the road ahead, rather than going back-and-forth between the speedometer and the lane lines. I absolutely acknowledge that there's also a point where this automation gets in the way or causes operators to tune out and be unprepared when asked to take over when the envelope is exceeded. Right-sizing that level of automation is critical!
This topic reminds me of an observation I made a while ago. I have found many folks (esp. non-technical) confuse automation with intelligence (more-so Artificial Intelligence).
Automation ==/== AI. Automation consists of a series of systems that are designed (i.e., programmed using control algorithms, logic rules, machine/deep-learning) to operate under a series of pre-set boundaries. The boundaries are typically defined under "normal" operating conditions, and safe-guards are put into place once the automated systems deviate from those "normal" operating conditions (I see a lot of practitioners esp. in the ML world fail to account for abnormal conditions...may be this is what happened w/ the Uber driver?).
The only comment I will say about AI is that I'm glad I am seeing RL and the like come more into play. I also contend this feels like a supervisory problem.
> As a controls engineer building factory automation, it's about letting humans do human things and robots do robotic things.
That’s not really what happens though. I also have some experience in automation. We humans don’t free ourselves up to do human things. We become slaves to the machines and automation. Yes, automating something frees up a human from doing the same thing, but when does it stop? The human just moves on to some other automation task in a never ending quest of scale.
At my shop, our shared goal is to make lives and products better. When done properly, automation is a tool, not a slave-driver. Scale isn't inherently bad, you can make the human experience more comfortable and fulfilling by satisfying basic needs with less effort.
People in a factory I worked in last week aren't gnawing furniture out of lumber with their teeth, nor are they whittling it with stone knives, sawing it with steel hand tools, or cutting it with power tools, they're loading and unloading CNC routers. It's not one person and $500M worth of equipment that lets a forklift operator dump logs in at one side and spit out semi trucks loaded with pallets of furniture, nor is it 2000 people and a bunch of hand tools, and it's about 200 skilled people and $20M worth of equipment. The most important feature of the equipment is the diagnostics, adjustments, and flexibility, allowing their operators to use their human judgement to improve operations.
We have declined a few of potentially profitable projects in the past year because we felt they were not a good match for our values, when customers had specs that required locking out operators from doing more than pressing "Cycle start", were unwilling to invest in training due to high turnover, or otherwise treated people poorly, or especially when they wanted to cut corners on safety, those are just not places that we partner with. This isn't purely altruistic, the effort invested in those undesirable shops is typically less valuable over the long term compared to the rising companies that treat their people better.
Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia.
If automation was truly in the spirit of freeing people from having to struggle to survive, imagine a system build around an automated future where because everything is so efficient and there's no need for menial labor, you can just kind of do whatever you want; art, research, gardening, you name it. Freeloaders in the system sum up to a rounding error for the resources needed to support them because the system is efficient. Enough people like the system that they willingly work to maintain it and improve it (it's even exciting for them to study and build new and better ways of providing the resources than the existing way), but ultimately you just have time to do the things you tell yourself right now you can't do because you need to take meetings/clean up the house/work 8+ hours a day to sustain a basic living, etc.
It's likely going to be a tough transition as long as we still think in terms of "I as a person must maximize my gains and protect them from everyone else", but automation could easily provide such a life for everyone if it advances enough. That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.
> Automation doesn't need to have The Matrix as the end result; it could be a Star Trek utopia.
In some alternate world, perhaps.
In the real world, developing AI is costing capitalists a lot of capital, and they fully expect to capitalize on this technology, at the expense of all the rest of us.
> That transition is gonna be a hard one though as the habit of personal gain is a tough one to break after living in it for so long.
This is ridiculous. 99% of us simply have no choice. We keep working, not because of "personal gain" but so we can continue to eat food and have shelter over our heads. Our relationship to "personal gain" is simply irrelevant in this equation because we have no power.
Only a tiny number of people who are already incredibly rich because of obsessive attention to personal gain will have any say, and of course, they will decide in favor of MORE personal gain.
Blaming the rest of us for this is simply victim-blaming.
I'm not sure why you're taking this as victim blaming. _Everyone_ needs to change, including the corporations and the very society we live in to make it a goal.
If it wasn't implicit in my fantasy world, there is no more class difference. Everyone has a very good baseline, like _VERY_ good. Clothing, food, transportation, energy, housing. When this is all taken care of in a great way, what exactly will corporations have to sell anymore to have the power they have now?
Personal gain doesn't just mean exorbitant wealth, it means the entire style of life we've built modern society around. Yes, I work for personal gain because I want to travel, eat cool food, and get nice things to make my life better. Everyone does this because they have to. That's not victim blaming, it's a fact of life that everyone does this. Many have to work harder and struggle more because of the inequality of the system that forces the only means of living as "work towards personal gain."
Now just try to imagine for a moment what your life would be like if you didn't have to focus on personal gain, you just implicitly had a guaranteed stable and nice and comfortable life; what would you do? Would you still try to chase only ventures that secure your future further, or would you maybe start to consider more passion projects?
To be perfectly clear, I absolutely understand that this is not as simple of a matter of "hey everyone, let's just be nicer" and then we will have utopia. Far from it, I understand there are deeply entrenched systems that force this way of consumption and struggle on the entire planet.
The first step towards something better however is to accept that it can be possible; as long as we're telling ourselves it can never be better, naturally it's going to be stuck this way. You can see small examples of this everywhere; municipal ISPs versus the incumbent ISPs are a perfect example of a community saying "hey, the corporation is bullshit, let's do our own thing", and this works out pretty well, results in better and cheaper service for communities, and ultimately weakens corporations as they have to play nicer in order to play at all.
What other elements in your life could be improved like this? That is all I'm asking you to think about.
> If it wasn't implicit in my fantasy world, there is no more class difference.
False. There would only be class difference. Even in Star Trek, some people are starship captains who own French vineyards or luxury apartments in San Francisco while other people can only manage to live in a trailer in the desert, or on marginal planets on the border that are surrendered to the Cardassians, and if those colonists try to declare independence from the Cardassians, Starfleet will literally use weapons of mass destruction to make their homeworlds uninhabitable to human beings.
This is _my_ fantasy world, not bound by the history of Star Trek; the show itself in later series got ruined by awful writers who couldn't figure out how to make a sci-fi utopia fun to watch and instead made a faux-military/action drama for no reason. I want no part in that future.
Second, I think you actually miss the point of these episodes; the challenge in the Cardassian border wars and issues was "how does a space utopia exist with a (comically) fascist regime?" Debatably, the actions of the Maquis and other border colonies were persons stuck in a land ownership mindset which is exactly what I think we need to avoid. Data even proved this in the episode with the Sheliak to convince the people of Tau Cygni V that a place is just a place.
I have no idea what you're referring to about a trailer in a desert, but in actual Star Trek, everyone had a home, had food, had a place to live.
Regarding luxury apartments and vineyards, I must ask: why would you care? If you have a spacious and great apartment that meets your absolute every need for you and your family, why would you care if someone has more square meters or a higher floor on a high-rise? In a world where transporters and shuttlecraft and replicators exist, why would you care where your home is located except that it meets your personal vision of a perfect home? You can live in the middle of the alps and have every modern convenience at your fingertips and just enjoy the snow.
As for the vineyard, again, I think you're looking at this from a very current perspective; in a world with replicators and synthehol where only a few specific snobs care about real alcohol versus replicated alcohol, owning a vineyard and manually tending to it likely is just something where everyone goes "right, have fun with that." (Also, Picard didn't own the vineyard, his brother did. I guess in the Picard series he controlled it also? But never watched it)
I really cannot take the comment seriously as I think you both miss the point of the episodes regarding property/land and also are not considering how people might view apartment sizes and such in a world when transportation, knowledge, information, energy costs, food, basically everything is already taken care of. Remember, even humble Scotty thought he was being given an admiral's treatment in TNG when he got a _basic_ quarters for his stay.
Try to imagine that's what your normal life looks like, and then ask yourself how much you would care if someone has a few extra square meters.
You can have whatever fantasy world you want, but it’s still fundamentally incompatible with human nature. Even in the absence of material constraints, human beings will still compete for relative status. If you live in the United States today, you are incalculably wealthier than even the aristocrats of old, but this has not managed to alleviate envy.
Also, class difference has been decoupled from material wealth for centuries already. Just like a prosperous burgher from an Italian city-state in the early modern period was never considered the equal of an aristocrat who held a fraction of his wealth, a successful arctic fisherman, electrical lineman, or oil field worker is still in a lower social class than a less wealthy Ivy League graduate.
A future where the baseline minimum isn't homelessness and suffering in the street simply has not been done before.
Remove the need to struggle for a basic comfortable life, a new world has a chance to thrive.
The past has the burden of dealing with the fact that the difference between a day-labourer and a wealthy elite is the former has to struggle to meet basic survival and participation in society is eliminated the the basic day-to-day is already met.
Human nature will adjust, just like it did to the industrial revolution, to the digital revolution, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of data entry specialists were replaced by digital automation; even more land-laborers were replaced by farm automation.
The difference with the future I want is that there is a guarantee of a good and basic living, whereas the past had no ability to guarantee this.
Human nature doesn't enter into it; when anyone can travel anywhere, can replicate the same food or goods the wealthy elite currently enjoy exclusively, there is no practical separation between them. It becomes a non-issue; just like some years ago emoji were a status symbol (remember, you used to need to _pay_ for stupid emojis), they're a standard now.
The world can be better, we see this everywhere even today with municipal and community efforts, with OSS, and so on. It's already here in many spheres, it's just a matter of accepting that there's no harm in a percentage of society taking advantage of such a system.
The points you make have no relevance in a world where you don't need oil workers, arctic fisherman, day laborers, and so on.
> Remove the need to struggle for a basic comfortable life
Literally anyone who was alive during the 19th century would say that we’ve done this already.
> The points you make have no relevance in a world where you don't need oil workers, arctic fisherman, day laborers, and so on.
My point was that the oil workers and arctic fishermen are already richer than many of the Ivy Leaguers, yet occupy a lower social status because our elite status games are decoupled from material wealth. Making material wealth even less relevant to daily life will only intensify these trends.
> Human nature doesn't enter into it; when anyone can travel anywhere, can replicate the same food or goods the wealthy elite currently enjoy exclusively, there is no practical separation between them.
No, it just means those luxuries will cease to function as markers of status. It doesn’t mean markers of status will go away. Most markers of elite status have little to do with money because money is already too easy to get.
Yeah, agree, for a lot of people, social status will be always the primary driver. But if ever achieve a society where everybody has all necessities taken care of without needing to work for them, and people (the ones who choose to) only struggle for social status, that, for all practical purposes, is utopia.
Becase if we didn't, there'd be 95% of us still producing food manually and the other 5% would be blacksmiths and other supporting roles for food production.
Now, only a tiny percentage of people produce food, and the rest can be community managers on twitter.
When humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, people actually had less leisure time, worked longer hours, and had worse health. We just keep repeating this ad nauseam. The research shows that even over the last couple hundred years, leisure time has greatly reduced in so-called developed countries.
Let us not forget the anarcho-syndicalist communes. They would take turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week.
But all the decisions of that officer had to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting. By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major matters.
Thanks for sharing! That’s exactly it. I really do think that we have the technology and ability to return to a sort of technological advanced system of hunting and gathering with some agriculture. In that, we could apply just enough automation to simplify our lives but then go about just living. Today, life is a never ending grind and to what end? We work and work and work towards the goal of only retiring when our bodies and minds are spent.
Capitalism is a failure in this aspect. Humans become a machine to grow more capital at the cost of quality of life and the environment.
I swear they must be running some cult machinery inside MBA schools. Practically every MBA I’ve met parrots the same language and has the same beliefs and approaches.
About 1/3rd of the cost of an airline ticket is labor. Many people in the travel industry would rather be at home with their families, traveling themselves, pursuing other hobbies instead of working
> Many people in the travel industry would rather be at home with their families, traveling themselves, pursuing other hobbies instead of working
But they’re not because they need the paycheck.
You’re fooling yourself to think the fruits of automated labor will not end up simply laying them off with basically no other benefits than the general population: slightly cheaper air travel (if nobody else gobbles up the differential).
In the end excessive automation it’s a bad proposition for labor in general.
Most people I know would stop working in an instant if that didn't mean they ended up living on the street.
But we will never get that choice. Once all our jobs are destroyed, there isn't going to be any help coming. We will simply be classed as inferior workers, and society will brush us off in favor of the 0.1%
For example, in terms of navigational errors, automation enables pilots to make huge navigation errors very precisely…
That's kind of interesting. It sounds similar to how every once in a while, pre-smartwatches, I would walk a mile or so on my way somewhere before noticing that Google Maps had me pointed in the opposite direction.
Then put the technology in and still have two pilots. This is a rare case, these days, where a democratically elected (kinda sorta) government can exert control over the appropriate degree of automation in an industry. We shouldn’t cave to the airlines. Look what we let happen to the railroads, which will likely collapse in the next few years due to excessive automation.
You are right that current planes are still pretty dumb. It's an artificial restriction though. Certification in this space is very tough for obvious reasons so there are not a lot of companies working on self flying planes because getting solutions in this space past the certification is going to be a long and expensive process. There are a few though and there have already been unmanned cargo flights.
From a technical point of view, flying and landing planes automatically is not that hard. It's a lot easier than self driving cars. And probably also a lot easier than landing a rocket, which is of course something that is not done manually by spacex. Why would they? It's way too complicated for humans and most of the important things require split second decision making far beyond what humans can even do.
The hard part is going to be fixing procedures and practices, which are optimized for humans communicating via 1960s technology. A lot of what pilots do isn't staying ahead of the plane (as they sometimes refer to it) but dealing with a crazy level of communication overhead of people yelling out courses, altitudes, transponder codes, radio frequencies, and weather information to each other over a really poor radio connection, while baby sitting the auto pilot, running down endless checklists, and micro managing it's gazillions sub systems. It's stressful and even very experienced pilots quickly loose the ability to keep up if they don't fly regularly. Because people fundamentally aren't very good at this stuff. They make mistakes. They mishear things. Etc. It's hard but also very much something that could and should benefit massively from automation. Lots more than we have today. All that check listing can be vastly simplified with automation. All the routine sharing of information can be done in text/binary form and be machine readable so the auto pilot can act on it (with or without human confirmation). Etc. But that requires change and the aviation world is extremely change resistant.
The military will likely get there first. The new B21 apparently can fly unmanned. It may still have a crew but it should be able to operate without one.
The actual hard part is dealing with emergencies. It's impossible to anticipate and code for every possible failure mode, but an experienced human pilot can sometimes figure out a good solution from first principles. In the famous case of US Airways flight 1549, the pilots intentionally disregarded part of the official checklist and improvised a new procedure on the fly. Would an automated system have performed as well?
The military is willing to accept a certain amount of operational losses in order to accomplish their mission, especially for unmanned aircraft. Tolerance for losses on commercial passenger flights is virtually zero.
>But that requires change and the aviation world is extremely change resistant.
But that resistance to change doesn't come out of nowhere. Getting complex systems on a plane is hard for a good reason. On a Level A system (which any system taking direct control over airplane controls would be) hundreds of people's lives are at stake.
The certification isn't there to stifle innovation and automated systems aren't disregarded because of a general dislike of "change". These systems are in place because they save lives. Software in planes needs different standards.
Most modern planes can fly themselves to quite a significant extent, but what they can not do is deal with emergencies, which push the plane outside of the design parameters where the software can function, that is where a crew is most needed.
They could deal with emergencies better. Even with the Miracle on the Hudson scenario, automation could have quickly calculated gliding distance, nearby airports with acceptable runway length. Landing on the runway was possible but it required quicker action.
It's ridiculous that pilots are still expected to attempt to calculate glide distance and airport in their head, and they almost always get it wrong.
Many private planes with modern avionics now have an auto-level button on the AP that very reliably recovers from a dive or other unusual attitudes. Airlines typically don't and it's clear that the simple (and very easy to program) button could have saved many lives.
Emergencies are very often situations in which the plane is operating outside of normal parameters or even outside of specified parameters, e.g. a sensor failure or damage to the aircraft. In those situations software can not reliably control the plane and should return control to the crew.
The nature of emergencies themselve make dealing with them in software near impossible. How do you write software for a condition you can not anticipate? How would you test it? How can you make sure that it is not misdiagnosing a situation and making the problem worse?
The 737max disaster should be enough to demonstrate how dangerous misbehaving software in a plane can be.
Human airline pilot here, I'm not sure where you're getting this from:
> Many private planes with modern avionics now have an auto-level button on the AP that very reliably recovers from a dive or other unusual attitudes. Airlines typically don't and it's clear that the simple (and very easy to program) button could have saved many lives.
Every modern jet since the early 90s has this. In every family of Airbus you can press the 'ALT' push-button or pull on the V/S knob. Both will level off the aircraft immediately (with slightly different follow-on characteristics).
Edit: to add more context, this works in unusual situations like dives and high-nose attitudes as well. The only difference is the inertia of a modern jet means the leveling off takes a bit longer.
It won't auto-level the wings for you in an airbus, however unless you're in an unusual configuration in alternate or direct laws (requiring a significant series of failures), the bank angle is limited by the aircraft anyway (whether you're on AP or not). For reference, in my 10 years of operating Airbus aircraft I have seen alternate law just once, we train it in the sim regularly but it's not a common occurrence.
Pressing ALT is taught as the correct thing when you're not completely sure what to do but for a fully unusual attitude (e.g. really nose-high or nose-low, or an acute bank angle) then currently the procedure is to handle it manually. To be honest, to get a large aircraft into that situation requires a pilot to screw it up badly in the first place, the AP won't get you there (well it might but hasn't happened yet).
A couple of years ago most airlines started training a more verbose method of recovery (disengage, push/pull, roll, thrust, stabilise - is the mantra) in response to studies conducted by Boeing and Airbus. Before airlines I used to compete in and teach advanced aerobatics so I'm not completely happy with that procedure (e.g. why push/pull first if you have huge bank on, only going to make things worse) but it's what the industry is pushing right now.
Overall though I think the bigger issues with pilot error are not things like unusual attitudes, yes they do happen from time to time but far more incidents occur from unstable approaches and silly inputs during takeoff. Hence why most changes in regulation right now are in those areas.
I think there is some confusion here about "automation". The benefits referred to involve providing greater access to information. The problems referred to involve putting more layers of abstraction between you and what you are controlling.
I see this in system admin. It's not a popular view, but automation is not always the best way forward. maintaining your terraform/ansible/etc ecosystem to run a single service on a single raspberry pi that sits in an office running a ticker above reception is far more work than a 5 line instruction manual. Chances are you'll never have to touch that box again until it comes time to move office, and when you do all that automation fails anyway.
The real problem in automation is the area Tesla is in: halfway there.
As pilots age out of real experience, their replacement with by coddled by vr and never manage. Full manual for years until the auto fallback hits them and suddenly they have a huge issue of recall.
So no matter how many pilots you have, automation needs to be all or nothing.
Automation really just takes out the hand-eye coordination part. It helps you fly more precisely. It does not take out the decision-making. It is also comforting to passengers that there are highly experienced people overseeing the operation of the plane.
> “I’VE COME across a number of people over the years who think that modern airplanes, with all their technology and automation, can almost fly themselves. That’s simply not true. Automation can lower the workload in some cases. But in other situations, using automation when it is not appropriate can increase one’s workload. A pilot has to know how to use a level of automation that is appropriate.” … “Whether you’re flying by hand or using technology to help, you’re ultimately flying the airplane with your mind by developing and maintaining an accurate real-time mental model of your reality—the airplane, the environment, and the situation. The question is: How many different levels of technology do you want to place between your brain and the control surfaces? The plane is never going somewhere on its own without you. It’s always going where you tell it to go. A computer can only do what it is told to do. The choice is: Do I tell it to do something by pushing on the control stick with my hand, or do I tell it to do something by using some intervening technology?” [0]
[0] Sully: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, Jeffrey Zaslow https://a.co/2iSmRDH