Comment by anonymars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymars | Hacker News Reader

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There's sort of an analogous conundrum with Airbus-style automation: the system has various levels of automation and protection (e.g. preventing you from stalling the plane)

And then when something goes wrong, you are unceremoniously handed a plane with potentially some or all of those protections no longer active.

As an analogy, imagine your FSD car was trying to slow down for something, but along the way there is some issue with a sensor. So it gives up and hands control back to you while it's in the middle of braking, yet now your ABS is no longer active.

So now the situation is much more sudden than it would have been (if you had been driving the car you would have been aware of it and slowing down for it youself earlier in the game), you likely weren't paying as much attention in the first place because of the automation, and some of the normal protection isn't working.

So it's almost three levels of adding insult to injury. Potentially related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970363

I’ll defend airbus a little - there are flight laws that more or less provide at any given moment as much automation as is possible given the state of the sensors and computers. So it doesn’t just go ‘oops, a sensor failed, now you have direct control of the plane.’

It does have the same problem - if 99.999% of your flight time is spent in normal law you are not especially ready to operate in one of the alternate laws or god forbid direct law, which is similar to the case of a driver who perhaps accustomed to the system forget how to drive.

But I think we have a ways before we get there. If the car could detect issues earlier and more gradually notify the driver that they need to take control, most every driver at present retains the knowledge of how to directly operate a car with non-navigational automation (abs as you mentioned, power stearing, etc)

Yeah, it's a tricky problem to solve, but other design decisions exacerbate it too, like the lack of visual or tactile feedback in the controls.

I was thinking of something similar to XL Airways Germany 888T. I was trying to find it and came across this thread making a similar comparison so I'll link that: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/18ks9nl/p...

But I think there was some other example with an engine asymmetry (an autothrottle issue?) that the autopilot was fighting with bank, and eventually it exceeded the bank limit and dumped a basically uncontrollable aircraft in the pilots' lap. It would have been more obvious if you were seeing the yoke bank more and more. (Though it looks like this was China Airlines 006, a 747SP, which contradicts that thought.)

I agree that we can make the situation less abrupt for cars in some cases (though people will probably get annoyed by the car bugging them for everything going on)

I looked into China Airlines 006 a bit more (https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/falling-from-the-sky-the...). It's pretty wild how it went and how badly the pilots lost situational awareness. But, sure enough:

> "In trying to explain why Ho never took this critical step and subsequently failed to notice the plane’s increasing bank, the NTSB looked at two areas: fatigue, and overreliance on automation. Regarding the latter, investigators noted that during cruise flight, the job of a Boeing 747 pilot is to monitor the automation, not to fly the airplane. Studies have shown that humans are naturally poor monitors of automation, because it’s boring and does not actively engage our brains and bodies. As a result, when something goes wrong, the brain has to “wake up” before it can assess the situation and take corrective action. Therefore, when flying on autopilot pilots have increased reaction times to unexpected events, as opposed to flying manually, when a sudden change in the state of the aircraft can be instinctively assessed using physical cues transmitted via the control column."

So who knows what we can do. I've definitely experienced this to varying degrees with the fancier cruise controls (e.g. "Autopilot"). It's one thing to just take pressure off the gas and/or steering wheel, but another entirely when you aren't actively "driving the car" at full attention anymore.

It’s important to point out that airline pilots are trained to handle sudden emergencies. This has been incredibly successful at scale. But it came great expense of both money and lost lives. And it still isn’t perfect.

The level of training required to oversee full automation is non-trivial if you have to do more than press a stop button.

Notably, it’s likely harder than… just driving yourself.

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