Automated systems in aircraft reduce some risks at the cost of increasing other risks. Incorrect or inconsistent applications of automation to complex human-machine systems can have unexpected and even deadly consequences.
NASA Ames Research facility has done a lot of thinking about the proper ways to design these systems. Dr. Charles Billings, in particular, has published a number of excellent papers on the subject. Here’s an excerpt from his 1995 paper, “Human-Centered Aviation Automation: Principles and Guidelines”, where he asks (and answers) a fundamental design question:
If the human operator cannot effectively oversee and retain management authority over his tools, he has lost authority over the entire operation. Will this be a tenable situation?
I believe it comes down to a matter of trust. Will we provide pilots with full authority, train them carefully, and trust them to do “the right thing”, whatever it is in particular circumstances? Or will we circumscribe pilot authority by making it impossible to damage the airplane, and in the process perhaps make it impossible to use its ultimate capabilities if they really need them…? My bias, based on a number of cases in which pilots have been able to recover from extreme emergencies, and other cases in which they did not recover but could have had they used all available resources, is that command authority should be limited only for the most compelling reasons, and only after extensive consultation with both test and line pilots or controllers at “the sharp end” of the system.
Boeing and Airbus, the world’s largest manufacturers of transport aircraft, seem to draw the “compelling reasons” line in different places. Under the Airbus computers’ “Normal Law” operating mode, the pilots cannot command inputs that would cause the airplane to enter an dangerous condition (for instance: they cannot stall the plane by increasing the angle of attack without adding thrust; the computer will prevent a stall from happening). Whereas Boeing’s approach is to make dangerous conditions increasingly difficult to cause (for instance: the Boeing’s control column will provide increased resistance against a pilot who is about to stall the airplane, making it physically more difficult for the pilot to cause this condition, but still allowing the possibility).
This continues to be an area of active study and discussion throughout the aviation community, and it has broader application as we interact more often with complex machine-controlled systems. Many pilots decry the apparent loss of airmanship due to the increase in cockpit automation.
Christine Smallwood, writing at the Baffler blog, examines the question, “What Does the Internet Look Like?” It’s a long way from the question to the answer, and the journey is well worth it.
After noting that many visions of the Internet rely on images of connectedness, she explores the essentially solitary nature of the Internet search:
We are born alone, we die alone, and we use the Internet alone. You may gather round the screen with friends to watch a video clip (turning the Internet into a television), or hang out while you play music on Pandora (turning the Internet into a radio), or post to your blog, or “comment” on someone else’s blog (turning the Internet into a roundtable, or a bathroom wall, depending). But these are subsidiary Internet uses. The essence of the Internet, the thing it does that nothing else can do, its Internet-ness, is the search. Comedian Dave Chappelle captured this with the skit “If the Internet Were a Real Place,” in which he loitered in a seedy mall like a modern Odysseus, ransacking CD stores, ducking into curtained rooms to indulge various temptations, and running away from spammers. Wandering around the Internet, the thing we are always searching for is the door—the exit ramp off the superhighway, the way home. But it’s hard to find. How do you know when you’re done doing nothing?
In one of their prophetic conversations McLuhan made the following prediction: ‘You’re going to win the war, Timothy. Eventually. But you’re going to lose some major battles on the way. You’re not going to overthrow the Protestant Ethic in a couple of years. This culture knows how to sell fear and pain. Drugs that accelerate the brain won’t be accepted until the population is geared to computers. You’re ahead of your time. They’ll attempt to destroy your credibility.’ Leary replied with typical Irish blarney: ‘It’s incredibility I’m after’, declaring himself a true futurist once and for all.
Maybe I’ve just not been paying attention, but in this age of micro-blogging, I’m surprised that Paul Klee’s 1922 The Twittering Machine hasn’t gotten more play.
Serge Brunier has created an incredible 360-degree panorama he calls “The Sky of the Earth:”
The images were collected from two exceptional astronomical sites, the Atacama Desert in the southern hemisphere and the Caldeira de Taburiente in the Canary Islands in the northern hemisphere.
It is the sky that everyone can relate to that I wanted to show — its constellations, its thousands year old stars, whose names have nourished all childhoods, its myths and stories of gods, titans, and heroes shared by all civilisations since Homo became sapiens. The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera.
