October 08, 2002

Flying bots

I just read an article in Discover about unmanned planes including the Global Hawk, an unmanned surveillance plane that flies itself including landing and taking off. Included in its specs are the ability to scan Indiana in 24 hours down to the level of detail where you can see individual people. The article also mentions the fact that they load the mission plan and then just sit there and watch the code scroll by and can step in at any time and change the mission or redirect the plane (which doesn't seem to ever be needed).

There was also a small but important aside in which they said that the commercial autopilot feature includes the ability to land with zero forward visibility (heavy snow) and that occasionally a pilot who is tired will just have the autopilot land the plane since it is better at landing. They also discussed the future of flight in which the 70 percent of flights that are caused by human error are eliminated and the planes fly themselves. Autopilots can only handle situations that they were programmed to handle, and humans pilots might exist solely to improvise when a very, very serious emergency occurs.

This is something that I have spent a good deal of time thinking about. When I step onto an elevator, drive my car, use my computer, turn on the oven, and a million other little things each day, I am trusting my life to somebody that I do not know who has statistically designed something. It seems that there is simply no stopping this trend, more technology that was designed with a simple preventative business mentality will exist in my everday life. By preventative business mentatility I mean that technology is designed to fulfill a purpose while minimizing the risk that the business can tolerate. For example, computers, TVs, and microwaves were designed and tested by businesses that could not afford long-term tests to see if they caused cancer. The advantages of TVs, etc. were determined to outweigh any of these concerns. In the movie "Fight Club" Edward Norton's character works for a major auto-maker. He says that he investigates accidents and decides if the company will issue a recall, and that the algorithm to do this is simply if the business will lose more money by issuing the recall they don't do it.

As a developer of software perhaps my view of technical professionalism and "perfection" is completely off base. Perhaps spending hours watching code fail and reading up on the overall lack of robustness in the field, I have a skewed view of the reliability of critical systems. I hope so.

October 8, 2002 06:54 PM