Jetstream Retrofit Illustrates How Close Modern Planes Are To UAVs 205
cylonlover writes with this Gizmag excerpt: "In April of this year, a BAE Systems Jetstream research aircraft flew from Preston in Lancashire, England, to Inverness, Scotland and back. This 500-mile (805 km) journey wouldn't be worth noting if it weren't for the small detail that its pilot was not on board, but sitting on the ground in Warton, Lancashire and that the plane did most of the flying itself. Even this alteration of a standard commercial prop plane into an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) seems a back page item until you realize that this may herald the biggest revolution in civil aviation since Wilbur Wright won the coin toss at Kitty Hawk in 1903."
Would you ride in one? (Score:2)
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Interesting)
At this point? No. In the future? Probably.
If you fly commercial air flights, you already trust your life to most of the technologies involved. As the article mentions, "larger aircraft have autopilot systems that can control takeoff, ascent, cruising, descent, approach, and landing." An unmanned flight was the logical next step in the progression.
I don't think we'll see passenger flights without pilots anytime soon, but you might begin seeing flights where you have only a co-pilot on board. It would be a long time before there would be enough evidence that the pilots weren't needed and the majority of the public would trust the systems enough to be willing to fly.
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:4, Insightful)
Would the "majority of the public" have a choice?
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Insightful)
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hm, yes, let me think: Gatwick to Murcia one way, pilotless: £29 or with human at the yoke: £499.
It's a no-brainer. Unless of course, you don't fly.
I'd rather take the Tunnel and drive for 44 hours, actually.
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. This would almost certainly be a democratic decision by the flying public, on whether to go pilotless or not. Thanks to the forces of economics.
There are numerous airlines in this world, and most routes (at least the popular ones) are served by multiple companies. The smaller routes don't count much in this picture, and those are likely to be the last to be automated, for there are less savings to be made. Also volume is just a fraction of that on the main routes.
Now if one company moves to pilotless flights, presumably to undercut the fares of the competition, the public has an obvious choice. If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow. If they do not, the pilotless airline will have to reinstate their pilots or go out of business.
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Or more likely, the other airlines will go pilotless but stuff some guy in an old uniform to act as a greeter and then sit in the cockpit while trying to look important.Then they'll run the commercials about how much they care about you.
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Every pilot starts out with two buckets. One is filled with luck, the other empty of experience. Fill the experience bucket before the luck bucket runs out.
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"If they accept the lower fare for a pilotless flight, the rest will follow."
On long flights, there will be several pilots on different shifts instead of 1 tired one, if a pilot keels over for any of 500 reasons, they'll have replacements ready to take over in a second. And on arrival in Rio, the pilot in the US just drives home instead of being stuck there in a noisy hotel with a bad mattress to get fresh for the flight back and trying to get sleep with 5 or 6 drinks.
They'll argue it's more secure and ther
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it takes 8 years to qualify for commercial jet right seat (navigator), and that's full-time and intensive from single engine prop VFR to qualifying on emergency landing in a 747 box simulator and everything in between. It isn't cheap, either. Probably a million or so a year for one pilot or navigator. Airlines part-subsidise this cost in a lot of cases with the proviso that the pilot then flies for that airline for the next twenty years.
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That's weird, somehow it only took me two and a half years to get to the right seat of a jet. Just over a year of ATPL theory, 6 months of intensive VFR/IFR/twin engine training, and then onto the type rating. I know it's different in the states, where they require a couple of thousand hours flying in aeroclubs and cheesy cargo operations before even considering you for a jet, but many European companies have ab initio programs that take a lot less time.
Getting an IFR licence is around $100000, a type ratin
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Flying is the ultimate in trusting technology, even before the autopilot. You are suspended in the air by nothing but the reliability of the engines to keep you from dropping 30,000 feet into the middle of the Pacific ocean, thousands of miles from any help. The fac
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Nonsense. You are suspended in air by those wings, which, in the event of engine failure, are still typically operational.
Now remove those wings, strap on a pair of more powerful engines, and ask pilots how they would feel about an engine failure.
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If you fly commercial air flights, you already trust your life to most of the technologies involved. As the article mentions, "larger aircraft have autopilot systems that can control takeoff, ascent, cruising, descent, approach, and landing." An unmanned flight was the logical next step in the progression.
The reason we have pilots is that these systems fail or fuckup all the time, but because we have pilots, its not an issue. The pilot takes over and sets things right, and none of these incidents are even reported. There is not a bit of paperwork filed when a pilot has to assume control of a take off or an approach due to any circumstance what so ever.
Remember that even THIS flight had a pilot.
The systems you mention work fine in "the clean room" of a totally controlled environment, and they fail with the
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a result, and to my dismay as an Airbus pilot, Airbus have modified their stall recovery procedure to retard thrust to idle- contrary to every thing pilots are taught from the very first stall.
The final mishap report makes very interesting reading (as do most reports): http://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp090601.en.pdf [bea.aero]
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I am not a pilot nor am I trained in aviation. My impression of the Air France disaster was that it was caused, in part, by an incorrect mental model of the situation in the mind(s) of the pilot(s). The pilot at the controls was making control inputs that didn't make sense for the situation, but he wasn't an idiot, so he must have not understood the situation. It didn't seem to help matters that the aircraft systems quit warning about a stall when the systems could not make sense of the sensor inputs, the
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However, they did recognize stall. They just failed to execute a proper recovery. They needed to hold the nose down for much longer to build airspeed bef
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They did not realize that they were making contrary inputs. And I do not agree that they recognized the stall. The pilot in control kept pulling back at the stick for most of the fall, and no sane pilot would do that if he knew he was in a stall.
The Airbus way of not making the physical sticks move in concert must have contributed to the confusion. The mishap report does not dare say that.
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The senior pilot, who was on rest when the incident began, also recognized the stall and got the junior pilot to finally say that he was p
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Destroying two towers and damaging one building is nothing for a country the size and might of USA. Compared to devastation of WW-II Dresden, Berlin, Stalingrad, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima etc, 9/11/2001 does not even qualify as a flea bite. But 9/11 made more headlines and more news than all the impact made by WW-II news in its day in the prized demographics of the terrorists.
The reaction of the media, and hence the public, is like an auto-immune reaction or allergy reaction. Some harmless pollen grains are detected in the bronchia and the body responds as though it is being invaded by the Ebola virus. So even after we deny the ability of terrorists to fly fully fueled planes into buildings, the media reaction for an attempted terrorist attack, no matter how successful, no matter how far fetched, would ensure the terrorists get their oxygen: publicity.
What we really need to prevent terrorist attacks is large doses of anti-histamine. Just ignore the terrorists, their attempts, their successes, their failures. Only when develop the collective ability to deny them publicity we will win the war on terrorism.
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be
locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target.
You are assuming that the terrorist would be on board the plane. Iran was able to capture a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 operated by the CIA using an attack on the remote location and command and control systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran [wikipedia.org]–U.S._RQ-170_incident#Capture_of_the_drone
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That is an unsubstantiated claim by Iran. It is equally as possible that there was a glitch in the system and the drone auto landed. If Iran had the ability to capture drones electronically there would be a lot of drones being captured. It is an attempt by Iran to embarrass the US and it worked pretty well.
By the way, please check you link before posting Here [wikipedia.org] is the correct one.
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On the other hand, if a zero-day for remoting a popular airline's planes ever does turn up in the wrong hands, it won't be pretty.
FEMA: "Say again, how many planes are crashing?"
ATC: "All of them."
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Which is why, as in the test, there will most probably be a human pilot on board for just such an emergency.
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If it ever gets approved to civilian passenger use, the flight deck would be impregnable from the passenger cabin. All controls will be
locked and so even if a terrorist gains access he/she would not be able to direct the plane to high value target.
planes are fly by wire nowadays, there is no need to touch flight sticks, those are just potentiometers with force feedback, plane brain is in the lower decks next to cargo hold.
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planes are fly by wire nowadays
Fly by wires isn't the same as fly by wireless which what it would be if you didn't have pilots (unless they went the way of the old "TOW" missals which were connected by fiberoptic cable).
Given the possibilities of jamming and hacking, I think there is less of a chance of a flight deck issue than other ways of hacking/jamming...
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The reaction of the media, and hence the public, is like an auto-immune reaction or allergy reaction. Some harmless pollen grains are detected in the bronchia and the body responds as though it is being invaded by the Ebola virus. So even after we deny the ability of terrorists to fly fully fueled planes into buildings, the media reaction for an attempted terrorist attack, no matter how successful, no matter how far fetched, would ensure the terrorists get their oxygen: publicity.
What we really need to prevent terrorist attacks is large doses of anti-histamine. Just ignore the terrorists, their attempts, their successes, their failures. Only when develop the collective ability to deny them publicity we will win the war on terrorism.
Similar thing with the school shooting IMO, I expect that if we stopped having a media circus after each one and turning the shitbags into celebrities we'd see a marked decrease. Instead we just keep making bigger deals and probably inspiring more people to go out in a blaze of "glory".
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the initial costs were high, but most of the costs you cite are reaction costs. How much did a week of grounding all airlines cost? How much does additional TSA infrastructure cost? How mush of that $1.4 trillion lost stock valuation was real vs just numbers in a computer, and how much of that was due to panic reaction?
As the grandparent pointed out, if we'd reacted with the attitude "shit happens, deal with it" (as was, for example, the attitude in Britain after the first few days of the Blitz), that final cost would have been far smaller; still 3000 lives, but probably less than $0.01 trillion dollars.
As OP alluded to, bee stings don't kill people, the anaphylactic shock reaction does.
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Indeed. The extremely thin skin that people have developed over the past few decades is very frustrating, as is the reliance on a media ecosystem dedicated to sensationalizing to make money.
Land of the wimp, home of the scared
Fuck No (Score:2, Interesting)
That is cool, but would you? Is it more safe if the pilot can't be reached?
There is no greater motivator to avoid crashes than having the driver up front and first to die.
There is no way I'm getting on a plane that is controlled by somebody in a ground based armchair, sucking on Slurm, and not facing any personal risk. If the driver doesn't have skin in the game, I'm not riding.
Pilots are a must for passenger aircraft. I'm not sure about cargo, but I'm leaning toward requiring pilots there too. Especially if they are to share airspace with passenger aircraft.
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You are already depending on the ground controllers to keep the planes from slamming into one another. To say they have no "skin in the game" is only true if they are sociopaths. Most people would not recover from the mental anguish of killing hundreds of innocent people.
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You are already depending on the ground controllers to keep the planes from slamming into one another. To say they have no "skin in the game" is only true if they are sociopaths. Most people would not recover from the mental anguish of killing hundreds of innocent people.
Pilots can refuse the instructions by the tower by announcing their inability of compliance. Ultimately the pilots have the final say on the plane, not the ground controller.
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Hehe, yes, let us remove minds from the areas closest to where they might do good, and keep them further and further away.
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Re:Fuck No (Score:4, Interesting)
Good idea? Bad idea?
.
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Terrorists could be threatening to slaughter the passengers like sheep, but the pilots aren't informed.
Sorry to inform you, you are on your own back there. You will have to go postal on them yourselves. Nothing, absolutely not
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You must have very little faith in your fellow humans. I think it would be a rare person who wouldn't be motivated to save the lives of hundreds of people who were entrusted in his care.
OTOH, the unthinkable has happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990 [wikipedia.org]
This is an example of why having pilots pass through TSA security is unneeded- a constant irritation for me. A proper in-depth background check is all that is necessary, accompanied by ongoing review.
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You must have very little faith in your fellow humans. I think it would be a rare person who wouldn't be motivated to save the lives of hundreds of people who were entrusted in his care.
OTOH, the unthinkable has happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990 [wikipedia.org]
This is an example of why having pilots pass through TSA security is unneeded- a constant irritation for me. A proper in-depth background check is all that is necessary, accompanied by ongoing review.
You, too, can do what pilots do. I do. It's called TS PreCheck [tsa.gov], and as a result, I show up at the airport (LAX usually), walk to an at-most 2 person line, drop my bag and cell phone on the belt, and walk through a metal detector. Security takes less than a minute, even if I have to wait for one other person in the lane. No removal of shoes, or taking off my coat, or taking my laptop out of my bag, etc. Just walk through a metal detector like back in the 90s...
I'm always surprised at the number of peop
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I'm always surprised at the number of people who don't know about this, nor use it.
You have to preregister and pay a fee, and there was talk of doing away with the system altogether which had a chilling effect. Anyway, why should you have to pay extra not to be sexually abused?
Re:Would you ride in one? (Score:5, Funny)
Of course not! It would be like riding in elevator without a lift man.
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you mean like now when the cockpit is hermetically sealed from the passenger cabin?
It is more complex then that (Score:2)
We already got a deskjob in the air travel industry, it is called air traffic control. And despite the ease of staffing it, the ease of having regular, short shifts so that staff can be available, in redundant numbers for emergencies and well rested, air traffic control is routinely understaffed and overworked.
Do you think remote pilots would be immune from the eternal pressures of cost cutting (on functional staff, never on executive wages). If one remote pilot can monitor one remote flight, why not two.
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And when someone successfully hacks the system and takes over the aircraft?
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"I'm a pilot, and I've already experienced several equipment malfunctions that would have led to a crash if we hadn't done our job. That's certainly more than the number of crashes I've caused (none)."
I there's no you, nobody can get forced to fly into buildings, land in Cuba etc. ...
No risk of food poisoning or alcohol or heart attack or
You're an interested party, we can't just believe whatever anecdotes you tell us.
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If there's a reinforced door, it's likely nobody can get forced into anything.
If there's food poisoning / drunk / heart attack, that's what a copilot is for.
Yes, a pilot is an interested party - interested in staying alive, too.
Now let's add a remote control device, remove the pilot, and imagine that instead of a bunch of terrorists having to coordinate physically hijacking a half-dozen planes (and now also having to get through reinforced doors to reach the cabin), you've got a bunch of terrorists getting
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So we have a bunch of pilots sitting in an office building somewhere controlling all the flights. The terrorists' target is no longer the cockpit on the actual plane but the building the pilots are in, or the comms link between the two. The difference is that taking over or destroying the building (which would be admittedly difficult) allows the terrorists to take over hundreds of planes.
We can reduce the risk by distributing the pilots in pairs in small offices all over the country. Even better, put the
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I agree
I'm a programmer, and know a little about AI.
On the surface, it's much easier to build a self-flying machine than a robotic car or even a vacuum cleaner.
The space were you can fly is more or less well known, there are a number of accurate and independent positioning systems available,
the traffic is controlled so nothing should show up in front of the aircraft. The runways are equipped with ILS systems that guides the plane on
a perfect glide slope. The most problematic part might actually be to taxi f
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Agreed, except for:
It seems like it could save a fair percentage of the money spent on pilots.
With this approach, pilots could work from anywhere in the world (think "flight centers" instead of "call centers" based in India) on regular shifts from fixed locations.
A pilot and two copilots would not be required for long flights -- there could be one pilot per plane for 100 planes and a couple e
who would have thought! (Score:3)
who would have thought that remote and autonomously controlled airplanes are airplanes!
I don't see the point (Score:2)
I don't see the point of a remotely piloted passenger plane.
UAFVG's are useful in military situations, but not for civilian use.
(OK maybe remotely piloted C130 for chasing hurricanes, or other dangerous weather, or dropping supplies to Antarctic stations.)
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Unlimited replacement pilots. ...
Pilots don't have to travel.
Local pilots who know an area can assist or take over.
AI can be integrated, or even replace the pilots without much of a change.
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AI can be integrated, or even replace the pilots without much of a change. ...
The abstraction of real time data given to a remote pilot is a real cost to be considered, given that many aspects of flight are dynamic and unpredictable. For example: routing through weather, mountain wave, multiple system failures, OCF (out of control flight), avoidance of traffic, sequence and separation, wake turbulence, are just a few issues that are diminished by remote piloting. And AI would need to come a long w
How is this new? (Score:2)
The US Airforce has been flying older jets via remote control for decades as part of the drone conversion programme to allow for air to air and surface to air missile testing and training - currently they are on the early F-16s after expending the F-4 inventory.
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But when one of them does crash... (Score:2)
... so much for the captain of the ship going down with it, eh?
Unless these remote pilots are sitting in full simulators that force them to share the terror of passengers during an uncontrolled descent - if you know you're going to live regardless what happens to the plane and its contents - then it removes just a bit of visceral motivation to avoid it happening, doesn't it?
And what's the point? (Score:2)
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Pilots could work normal shifts and you could change your flight crew in the middle of the Pacific if they were tired or in case of a medical emergency. For some reason, the people that we depend upon the most to be alert and make important decisions, like doctors and pilots, don't seem to get enough sleep.
Rubbish (Score:2)
What hyperbolic bullshit. Not only have standard piloted planes been remotely controlled for decades (as opposed to specially designed UAVs), but I'd say that reliable flight in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) was a bigger revolution.
This is merely a small stepping stone to remote flight that's reliable enough for regular public transport. It's not a fucking revolution. But
Captain Obvious (Score:3)
Captain Obvious is annoyed that you woke him up to tell him the blindingly obvious news that pilots are going the way of the buggy whip - just like automobile drivers and ditch diggers.
Captain Obvious also has some further thoughts for you. It's not just the pilots who are going away. Why should business travelers and even the general public want to fly about from place to place when there are cell phones? Hmmm? Already you can see as well as hear anybody anywhere in the world with a reasonably recent cell phone. Do you really think they won't be adding touch, taste, and smell via direct nerve stimulation? Why do you have to waste time and limited and expensive energy to go see your mother or go on a date? This way you won't catch a cold from your mother sneezing, and you can have a date with anybody, be adventurous, you can't get herpes or worse. Travel accidents, illnesses, and threatening confrontations are so old fashioned.
In fact, why get out of bed at all? Most jobs are obsolete anyway, and I wouldn't be so sure that IT and corporate officer jobs can't be automated too. Your robotic equipment can keep you nourished in bed and stimulate your nerves to keep your muscles toned and inject medicaments to keep clots from forming.
Why go to the trouble of seeking new experiences or exploring in the flesh? Robotic explorers make ever so much more sense. You can always catch the omni-sense documentary of the exploration.
Target identification... (Score:2)
This may represent a new realization of risk for the paranoid.
Cool... but... (Score:2)
This is a cool demo and all, but I find it highly unlikely any travelers will ever set foot on a plane where the pilot isn't also on-board. Simply put; radio tech is not perfect and in the event of a systems failure of some description you need a decision-making human being to make the final decision about a resolution. There's also the point of "accepted risk", where the pilot has just as much "skin in the game" as you do as a traveler.
The worst flight I have ever been on was one where the pilot made a pre
union time (Score:2)
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What did all of those taxi drivers do before taxis? What did the accountants do before the income tax? My read of history is that there will be short-term pain, but ultimately people will move into jobs that take advantage of our reduced need to spend time producing necessities.
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They were carriage drivers. Before income tax, there were no spreadsheets and even tabulators were dreadfully expensive so corporations had to hire a hell of a lot of accountants just to run the adding machines.
Consider, if we are at all successful at automating away work, at some point we can only realize that leisure if work hours are reduced for the same pay rather than just having fewer people working the same or longer hours. The last time there was a significant reduction in the average work day that
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Consider, if we are at all successful at automating away work, at some point we can only realize that leisure if work hours are reduced for the same pay rather than just having fewer people working the same or longer hours. The last time there was a significant reduction in the average work day that didn't involve starvation ages it took the threat of a communist revolution to accomplish it.
But also because we want more money to do more things. I've thought about the idea of asking for a 80% position - four day week - because I'd do fine on 80% of my current salary but I'd have a three day weekend every weekend. In the end I don't because it seems strange to me not to have a "full" job for no other reason that I don't feel like working that much and because there's always stuff you can spend extra money on. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just being silly and I'd be happier just cutting back and "ca
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One of the problems with working less than full time is that many modern jobs have a good-sized portion of fixed overhead -- just keeping up with what is going on, staying current, attending meetings and so on can take up a significant fraction of your work week. If you cut a day out of your week, the fixed overhead gets proportionally larger...
Another problem is that there are fixed overheads associated with having employees. Just finding and hiring the right ones (and getting rid of the wrongly chosen one
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The choices are accept a shorter week so others can also have a job, try to sweep back progress and destroy the robots, or cheerfully pay more taxes so others can go on the dole and stay there.
When unions were demanding the 8 hour day and the 5 day week, employers moaned nearly in unison that they could never be profitable that way and that the country would be plunged into poverty.
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What did all of those taxi drivers do before taxis? What did the accountants do before the income tax? My read of history is that there will be short-term pain, but ultimately people will move into jobs that take advantage of our reduced need to spend time producing necessities.
They didn't exist, that's what they did. Before taxis, there were zero automobiles. Before income tax, accountants had more of an inventory management role, making marks on clay tablets to keep track of how much grain was in the bins. Also,in case it has escaped your notice, the population of the planet has doubled in the past 50 years. There's more competiton for jobs than there has ever been.
Re:Software is eating the world (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete while hugely improving the standard of living overall.
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tell that to the father who can't feed his family or keep a roof over his family because his boss just replaced him with a fucking robot.
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Except that hasn't happened. Unemployment rates bear no correlation whatsoever to industrialisation or ongoing automation.
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CNet respectfully disagrees [cnet.com]. FTFA: Each robot will cost around three times the annual salary of a human worker at Foxconn to produce. So a robot that doesn't need time off, or paying, or a holiday, or medical insurance, or a lunch break, only has to last three years to be a viable replacement for a human worker who has to feed his family and keep the roof over their heads. Result: Foxconn develops a completely obedient workforce, human workforce which is prone to sabotage, strike, medical emergency, needs a
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that single example alone disproves the Luddite Fallacy.
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Every time there is an advancement in technology we end up being able to produce more for less cost. This has been going on since the time of your luddites (1817) and probably earlier. If what you're saying was true, we'd be able to graph a rising unemployment rate to correlate with advancing industrialisation. This, again, hasn't happened. Instead what's happened is standards of living have improved and unemployment has fluctuated up and down due to a wide variety of factors, but generally remaining low in
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Cheaper? How so? They still have to pay the pilot, whether she is siting on the ground or not.
I guess it could get cheaper if they can have one pilot supervising a dozen flights. Over mid-ocean, there's not much to do. So stagger the flight times and have them land/take off another plane elsewhere. Rotating shifts could be an advantage on long flights. At the end of eight hours, hand over the controls to a ground center where the pilots are wide awake on local time.
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because 20 packed airliners is 8,000 passengers.
And you want to put those lives into the hands of ONE fucking gamer geek who thinks he's playing MSFS?
No, you don't get to hit ESC and start over.
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No shit. Also: Now the "terrorists" don't even have to be on board, they can just hack the control system remotely.
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I didn't know that. Thanks. I feel safer already.
Re:Computers (Score:4, Insightful)
Until the first robo-Airbus slams into a mountain due to a minor hardware failure, program bug, or solar storm.
That's why automated mass transit trains still have operators on board and GPS-navigated ships still have deck officers.
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The fully automatic modes have to be much better than humans before people will accept them. If you ride in the front train of a Chicago CTA train, you can hear the overspeed warning beeping from the operator cabin about every 10 seconds. If the operator ignores it, the train will automatically shut down to prevent the train from derailing.
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the monorail at Gatwick doesn't have a driver, it is entirely automated. You can in fact, stand at either end and look out the front or rear window (either is changeable depending on the direction of travel). The control pod is under the deck at the North end of the car.
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Really? How does it cope with unexpected obstructions on the track?
Apples and oranges... (Score:3)
- - - - -
You take the human systems out of the plane and you aren't just dealing with the failures you observed with the previous system. You have changed the system so you are changing the possible failure points.
One simple example: "Portable EMP generator."
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Just turning it off isn't a catastrophic failure.
Until it slams into another train while coasting to a stop...
And no, having it automatically stop isn't a perfect solution, either, because then it becomes the target rather than the projectile.
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Until it slams into another train while coasting to a stop... .
. .
Because when coasting it is magically going to hit another train that it would miss if it was still going full speed?
... but maybe if it was going 88 miles per hour!!!
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the Gatwick monorail stands about 50 feet off the ground.
... on concrete (Score:2)
Last time I checked, concrete didn't fall apart when you turn off the power. What next, you are afraid that when your car stalls, the bridge it is on is going to collapse?
Either you are to stupid to be funny or you are just to stupid period.
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Hmm...I prefer a top of the line human and AI pilots, personally. So they can cover each other's weaknesses.
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I would hope the flying public considers safety rather than only seek the lowest price.
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Not just airlines.
Everyone immediately leaps to talking about passenger aircraft, but this is going to see large-scale use in air freight first. Passenger craft...perhaps, maybe, one day.
This adds quite a bit to the profitability of freight--or, once the market has done its work, reduced the cost of air freight. Take out the air crew and associated life support systems, and you can add another 300-500 kilos of freight to the manifest.
FedEx, DHL, etc. are going to be all over this, if they can get the idea
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Nobody has said anything yet but, one reason an Aircraft is saved from a crash is because the Pilot is actually in the Aircraft. With no Pilot, there is less incentive to save an Aircraft, or any man-made machine for that matter. The Pilot has a 100% survival rate. And you all know this.
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Wilbur made the first attempt but failed. Orville succeeded on his turn.