No, next question.
That’s the simple answer, but you’d probably like some explanation. Especially if you’re even halfway enthused over the prospect of being able to hop into your car of the future, enter some simple programming that will be similar to entering a new or pre-saved destination into your in-dash GPS navigation system, and then sitting back with your smart phone to catch up your email and text messages while you car drives itself to wherever you told it to go.
Just think of all the extra work you can accomplish while your car does its thing and you do your thing. While you’re catching up on the latest news and sports scores on your computer or smart phone (or newspaper if there still is such a thing and if you’re one of those holdovers from the Ancien Régime who must have a newspaper with your morning coffee) the robot that is driving your car will be dealing with traffic congestion and road rage. You will be blissfully ignoring all that hoopla, while deep into putting the final touches on a business deal, reading a thriller, or tweeting your political opinions.
Actually, if that is your schtick there is already a safer way to do it, and probably a lot more economical as well. It’s call Uber and Lyft. But I digress.
We all know that airplanes, ships at sea and even sail boats have autopilots to assist the human pilot by doing lots of repetitive and mundane chores. The autopilot of a modern jet liner is usually switched on by the cockpit crew shortly after takeoff. It isn’t ordinarily shut off until landing, just before touchdown. The pilot and co-pilot can then relax and watch the instruments and the weather while the autopilot makes all necessary corrections to the flight controls and keeps the aircraft on the pre-planned course the pilot has entered into its memory. If the pilot were required to fly a jet from New York to Paris with a live stick it would be a rather exhausting and tedious job keeping the plane level and at the correct altitude, not to mention minor course corrections.
I once spent a little over a month on a sea-going sail boat in the Mediterrenean. It was not my boat and I’m not a skilled sailor. The boat was owned and operated by a friend and his wife both of whom are expert sailors. I was useful only for doing whatever I was told to do, without any need to know what or why. One of my tasks was to enter into the autopilot a list of waypoints given to me by my friend, the “captain” of the boat. When activated, the autopilot would then make all rudder turns at the correct time and place to make the boat follow the correct course to our destination.
The captain determines the course for the boat to take by examining his extensive library of undersea charts. The Mediterrean is full of underwater wrecks, rock structures and other hazards. Most of these hazards have been mapped to help sailors avoid them. Striking one of them in a realtively small sailboat can mean sinking in a matter of minutes. In addtion to the autopilot the boat also employed radar and sonar to keep us informed of the sea’s depth, which averages 1,500 meters but there are numerous shallow areas and corral reefs. Sailors must know the depth of the water they are in at all times.
I saw that these automated systems were wonderful in taking over control of the rudder and allowing us to have quick access to vital information along the way.
When we lost our autopilot a hundred miles from shore I found out how vulnerable one’s exclusive relance on these systems can be. Without automated rudder control we humans had to drive the boat manually. If we were under sail maintaining the sails had be done at the same time. If we were motoring we would be relieved of that duty but sailboats have limited stores of diesel fuel and a running marine diesel engine must be monitored constantly from overheating, which could leave a sailbot dead in the water when the wind isn’t blowing. In some parts of the Mediterrean the wind often stops around midnight. Without an autopilot sleep time was shortened because more than one person needed to be awake at all times if we were under sail. Without the autopilot the experienced sailors were not going to turn the boat over to a non-sailor like me.
My friend the captain of the boat knew that when an automated system fails he would have to perform every task the system had been doing. He always mapped our course by reference to charts, astronomical observations, and dead reckoning as a back up. At sea, as in the air, one must always know where one is. If the GPS and other automated systems are no longer telling you where you are, you still need to know where you are.
Sea-going sail boat captains know their sailing skills are all they will having going for them when automated systems fail. They know that such skills are perishable if not constantly practiced.
Driving a car is, of course, a quite simple skill compared to sailing or flying. But if not used regularly it too can be lost over time. I’ve been riding motorcycles since I was a teenager over 50 years ago and consider myself a skilled rider. But living where the winters are long and cold for several months I have to be extra careful on the first couple of rides in Spring. I know not riding for 6 months or so leaves me vulnerable to making a mistake the first time out in April or May.
The driveless cars of the future will lull people into ignoring the need to maintain their driving skills. When the robot doing the driving stops working, will we know what to do?
A most poignant and frightening example of machine/human failure is the Air France 447 crash in 2009. “To put it briefly, automation has made it more and more unlikely that ordinary airline pilots will ever have to face a raw crisis in flight—but also more and more unlikely that they will be able to cope with such a crisis if one arises.”
It was a classic model of Aristotelian tragedy, which starts with some flaw, perhaps minor, in the protagonist that leads to a disaster out of all proportion.
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