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With top-notch AI help, humans may lose their skills, or zone out while on the job
Can we embrace automation without switching to autopilot?
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An automated system can assist humans, but this means that they may lose their skills or stop paying attention.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Tim Harford
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On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 vanished on a routine transatlantic flight. The circumstances were mysterious until the black box flight recorder was recovered nearly two years later, and the awful truth became apparent: Three highly trained pilots had crashed a fully functional aircraft into the ocean, killing all 288 people on board, because they had become confused by what their Airbus A330’s automated systems had been telling them.
I’ve recently found myself returning to the final moments of Flight 447, vividly described by articles in Popular Mechanics and Vanity Fair. I cannot shake the feeling that the accident has something important to teach us about both the risks and the enormous rewards of artificial intelligence or AI.
