The pernicious danger of automation from AI is atrophy of human skills.
There are people who think there's "no point" in learning a skill, for a career, if AI is "just" going to take it over.
When automation fails, people have no idea what to do.
In 1997, American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh coined the phrase "Children of the Magenta Line" in reference to pilots who rely on a magenta line indicating a course line.
68% of flight crashes involve automation.
There was a crash in 2009 of Air France from Brazil to Paris in which the auto-pilot disengaged about an hour into the flight. Airplanes have a mechanism which essentially smooths out the throttle and that mechanism turned off. When the pilots, expecting the smoothing of the throttle, made throttle movements, it caused the airplane to stall.
"William Langewiesche's article analyzing the June 2009 crash of Air France flight 447 comes to this conclusion: “We are locked into a spiral in which poor human performance begets automation, which worsens human performance, which begets increasing automation."
University of Miami professor Earl Wiener proposed a set of “laws” that include every device creates its own opportunity for human error; exotic devices create exotic problems; and digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large errors.
Langewiesche's rewording of these laws is that “the effect of automation is to reduce the ****pit workload when the workload is low and to increase it when the workload is high” and that “once you put pilots on automation, their manual abilities degrade and their flight-path awareness is dulled: flying becomes a monitoring task, an abstraction on a screen, a mind-numbing wait for the next hotel.”
Nadine Sarter of University of Michigan said that such “de-skilling is particularly acute among long-haul pilots with high seniority.” As Langewiesche added, “Beyond the degradation of basic skills of people who may once have been competent pilots, the fourth-generation jets have enabled people who probably never had the skills to begin with and should not have been in the ****pit."
CSDL | IEEE Computer Society
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