Robotic Nation Evidence

'I'm HAL; I'll Be Your Pilot'

From the article:

As you fasten your seat belt a "welcome aboard" announcement is made by a computer — because there is no captain.

While plane designers dream of a high-tech future, the aerospace industry is debating whether if it will become feasible to fly passengers without pilots.

The article has quotes from both sides of the aisle. However, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are already flying routinely for the military -- It is only a matter of time before pilot-free commercial aircraft take to the skies. Pilots will succumb to the same forces that will remove truck drivers from trucks:

• Pilots are incredibly expensive
• Pilots are prone to human error (as well as drunkeness, sickness, drowsiness, gropiness, etc.)
• Pilots need sleep, while robots can operate 24x7

The most telling quote in the article is this one from Boeing:

However, Boeing, the big U.S. plane maker, has refused to rule out UAV technology in its future airliners.

"We're evaluating the UAV concept. But we don't have any plans at this time to incorporate it into our commercial aircraft," said James Wilkinson, Boeing's manager of product analysis and communications marketing. "Following a review of the technology, if it makes sense, we probably would include it."

In Robotic Nation I predict that pilots will be out of their jobs by 2015. In Manna I propose one possible scenario that speeds up the process:

The first real robotic system installed in a human position of trust was in the airline industry. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 had been a wakeup call. In 2008 there was a run of six airline accidents, all attributed to pilot or ATC error, which made everyone nervous. Then in 2012 the unthinkable happened. Two airline pilots, both sleeper agents for an Asian terrorist organization, flew their planes into massive U.S. targets almost simultaneously and killed nearly 50,000 people. One hit a basketball arena full of spectators, and the other ripped through the Democratic national convention in Las Vegas. That was the end of human pilots in the cockpit.

As it turned out, the transition to robotic planes was remarkably easy. Airplanes were already controlled by autopilots while enroute. Radar systems on the ground and in the planes were already taking off and landing the planes automatically. An airplane did not need a vision system -- its "vision" was radar, and radar had been around for more than half a century. There was also a secondary backup system that gave airplanes a form of consciousness. Airplanes could detect their exact location using GPS systems. These GPS systems were married to very detailed digital maps of the ground and the airspace over the ground. The maps told the airplane where every single building and structure was on the ground. So even if the autopilot failed and told the plane to go somewhere unsafe, a "conscious" plane would refuse to fly there. It was, quite literally, impossible for a conscious plane to fly into a building -- the plane "knew" that flying into a building was "wrong." If the autopilot went insane, the conscious plane shut it off and radioed for help. If all the engines failed or fell off, the plane knew what was on the ground in the vicinity and did its best to crash into an unpopulated area.

By 2015, there were no human airline pilots and no human air traffic controllers in the system. Everything about flying through the air was automated. The cockpit was stripped out of airplanes and the space became a lounge or a seating area. With human beings out of the loop, the safety record of the airline industry improved and people came to trust the airlines again. No one cared at all that there was no human pilot in the cockpit -- people actually trusted machines more than human beings.

See Manna for details.