If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated. But with pilots having to actually talk to ATC (and sometimes talk over each other with no feedback) instead of observing their status on a screen and pressing buttons on what they want to do or change their status it seems like it will be quite hopeless for quite some time.
What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks. It might even be a good idea to try and digitize it for the ATCs so they talk less and press buttons more (which will feed into the simulation) and use TTS for the legacy transmissions to pilots that don't have an updated interface. Given the regulation on that industry it seems unlikely anyone competent enough to do it will have an interest to even try.
> If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated.
Even then you'll probably run into the long-tail distribution issues, similar to self-driving cars. 99.9% of all situations are pretty standard, but once in a while something so abstruse happens that it's not pre-programmed and requires some creativity to solve.
> What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks.
Fully agree. Some of the recent close calls really were "obvious" much earlier, meaning they were not caused by late course changes.
> hallucinate 10% of the time in charge of human lives
Out of curiosity, about a year ago I queried a few models about how to fly a particular instrument approach. It was an ILS approach using a DME arc transition. Other the basic concept of lateral and vertical guidance, most of the models got literally everything wrong. Wrong headings, wrong NAVAID frequencies. Wrong procedures. Maybe they’re better now in this domain, but they were confident in their claims of the ability to read an approach plate. But it was terrible.
Have we just forgotten that there is more to computing than LLMs?
Most big planes can land themselves now - in calm weather, at least. It's done regularly when fog is worse than a certain point, because the necessary radio signals pass through the fog. Both the airport and the plane need certain equipment. The same navigation equipment is used on many manual approaches, but with a human in the loop.
I'm using Opus on Claude Code and even on easy tasks, if you not review the changes properly, it creates tech debts. One of the most common issues is replicating the same logic with variables with different names (which makes grep harder to detect on future changes) in multiple places and lack of following project patterns. Even having a lot of .md files instructing to do the opposite.
I still didn't find a workflow without human interaction that can be that efficient and reliable.
You should be concerned and not excited. This future might be near than we can imagine and we're just accelerating things without thinking about the consequences.
Billionaire CEOs have silenced the informed sources of information. We live in a time that everybody knows the opinion of billionaires in every aspect of society (and it is bad) but science and journalism are seen with mistrust.
Marketing and entertainment are supplanting news and knowledge. I hope that the people that is pushing back succeed.
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