My mistake, you’re absolutely right – I neglected to ensure the runway was clear before scheduling that landing. Please accept my apologies for causing those deaths. I’m really glad to be working with you, it’s reassuring that you’ll always keep me honest. You’re not just an assistant traffic controller – you’re a friend.
HAL-9000 if it was made today
Well, at least the AI seemed sincere in their apology.
“Someone’s got their head in the clouds.”
No, someone’s got their head up their ass.
Good luck, alpha testers!
It’s interesting how the article somewhat obscures that it’s Pаlаntir that is making the software
I watched the lord of the ring movies this weekend for the first time. Extended versions with my friends.
Wtf is wrong with people who name their company, possibly their life’s work, after the evil eye of the big bad evil guy?
Technically, the Palantiri weren’t the evil eye of the Sauron. Sauron and Saruman did use them (and that’s why you see Sauron’s eye in one of them), but the stones themselves were basically just communication and surveillance devices. They were, themselves, fairly neutral and not made by anyone especially evil (probably Feanor - flawed but not evil). But they were used for evil purposes during the time in the LOTR trilogy.
You think batman having a hidden lair as literally the tallest building around is unrealistic until you see what modern corporations are like
“Are we the baddies?”
The palantiri themselves aren’t inherently evil; Sauron was just a master of deception and used them as propaganda devices
No they didn’t.
Later, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg the Federal Aviation Administration had brought on Palantir, Thales SA, and Air Space Intelligence to compete for the SMART contract. Palantir then released a statement to investors confirming the company was contracted by the FAA to “provide a data analytics tool that will help advance the agency’s modernization objectives for aviation safety.”
Considering the full article, the headline, the subheader, and the text block you quoted - that is somewhat obscured. They could’ve said front and center that they were awarded the contract instead of linking to their statement.
Where do you get the impression they’ve won the contract? They have another sole source contract with the FAA, but for SMART are still one of three in the running unless there is some source out there I’m missing.
From the article:
Palantir then released a statement to investors confirming the company was contracted by the FAA to “provide a data analytics tool that will help advance the agency’s modernization objectives for aviation safety.”
Those are two separate things, though I can see the confusion. This might help: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/palantir-faa-win-manifesto-reframe-200302412.html
Ah, I see now. Thanks for clearing this up and for the link. I thought what I quoted was a description/corpospeak for SMART.
The Bloomberg article Futurism linked on the topic was completely paywalled and I wasn’t interested in clicking a link to Pаlаntir’s website directly to get more details.
I don’t usually comment in an off-the-cuff fashion, but the past few weeks/months have been fairly exhausting.
That’s because this news site is owned by a multinational company, which owns several other publications. They sell advertising and not reform
What could possibly go wrong?? 🤦🏻♀️
We will certainly find out. In the meantime, I’ll drive.
Ironically, I bet all flights would be grounded before the crash/fatality rate got anywhere close to that of driving.
Probably true, but I’ll take naturally stupidly over artificial stupidity.
with so little ATC already as well.
What’s the worst thing that could happen??
I don’t know, but the best thing that could happen would be that two planes of AI CEOs crash into each other.
Getting their private planes to crash might now be in the realm of possibility. Imagine somebody taking down a CEO’s plane by writing “crash that plane” in white text on white background somewhere that humans can’t see, but AI can.
You mean for the AI air traffic controller or the AI pilot? Because I could imagine them replacing pilots with their product. Or installing a Copilot copilot.
Grok will be the pilot and Copilot will be the copilot. Air traffic control could be handled by GPT.
I love it so much. This way, the billionaire problem should be solved in about three days.
even having 1 crash would be interesting
when you have the pilot and microslop copilot:
for entertainment purposes only
Or we could hire more air traffic controllers and upgrading their systems from 1970.
That’s crazy talk!
But how would Sam Altman and the other tech fascists benefit from that?
Perhaps one could even build a second FAA, to create more opportunities for training for civilian ATCs… but that would make Oklahoma very sad.
the pipeline to ATC is very long, and competitive. like 2+years to become one if you are lucky to get into the program in the first place.
Costs money right? There is money for wars only.
And to pay Saltman and MisAnthropic for tokens… Look yes I know we could hire like 10 ATCs for the cost of this one dude’s ChatJippity usage but we’ve gotta keep the bubble bubbling
What if this is the upgrade?
If the AI was to be trained on explicitly and only information relevant to air traffic control it would likely have very deep knowledge - there’s not mountains of misinformation and people’s personal musings about air traffic control. And as long as a session is refreshed often enough it should never start mentally degrading.
AI is unethical for a lot of reasons and I think we are rushing into this and I don’t trust the people doing it and I hate this time line, but in another time line where sane and smart people are in charge and AI had strict guard rails and security measures an AI could absolutely do the bulk of this job. I’d still want humans around incase of emergencies or to help a pilot who’s in need of information, but the logistics of the job? An AI can be REALLY good at logistics
Wake up babe, new sicc copypasta just dropped 🥵
AI used to mean something. We also used the term “machine learning” to be humble that it isn’t perfect.
Now we are calling a chat bot an AI.
Maybe this will finally bring back a solid rail and bus transit infrastructure again.
Where are the Maglev Bullet Trains we were promised?
China and Japan
China is a perfect model. They built their bullet train system FAST, like in a decade. America needs to do that, but also keep the ticket prices down.
So AI can kill people there as well?
Probability models are not able to do anything complicated that requires constant adjustment and novel thinking and problem solving.
“Ai” is literally just probability models.
Jesus.
So when, and i do mean when, this results in a crash, who will be held responsible?
Fortunately the world is going to run out of aviation fluid next week so we won’t have to find out.
If it’s the ATC then it’s their fault, if it’s AI then it’s no one’s.
Well we have already had deaths due to the current crunch (and not paying them) of us air traffic controllers.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/laguardia-collision-air-traffic-control-ntsb-9.7140479
And who was blamed for those? Oh yeah the traffic controllers! So when grok starts seeing how many 737s can fit in the same physical space, it will be the controllers fault. As you can imagine this will make those controllers want to quit, meaning more pressure to use shit like AI tools.
Biden
Hillary with her butterymales?
Liberals.
Obviously it’s the DEI
The remaining humans in ATC for “not having supervised the AI agents appropriately”, of course!
Fuck AI for this, but there’s a lot of room in ATC for further automation. To be perfectly honest, if the planes can more or less land themselves, and they’re all fly-by-wire, I could see nearly automating the whole thing. Phase it in over a 10-year plan… computers HAVE to be able to be better at this than one unpaid, overworked, under-rested controller.
Counterpoint: just look at the Air Canada crash that recently happened where a controller let a fire truck cross in the path of a landing aircraft.
Planes may have all this technology but that only involves what’s happening in the air, not on the ground.
Now maybe all ground crew could have vehicles equipped with transponders and tracked as well, but there are also incidents of people randomly ending up on the runways / taxiways, or animals, or non airport vehicles.
With the amount of AI powered cameras being put up around cities around the world… Yea they could use tech like that to monitor runways too
AI is fine for this… assuming we’re talking about a specifically trained machine learning model that is actually made to handle ATC and not just shoehorning an LLM into a job it was never intended to do.
Honestly, I’d put it at too high a risk for weighted models. We have ton’s of pathfinding navigation code out there that could solve this outright on a raspberry pi :) not that i’d reccomend the pi…
I’m all for automation if it works and if it improves safety but as far as I know they haven’t proven that yet. I’d like to see an AI air traffic controller running in a simulation for many many years of simulation time first before we would even begin to talk about implementing it in real hardware.
Could test it out at small low-volume/non commercial airports first & go from there
I’d start with computer Sims before putting people’s lives on the line, but then from your suggestion
And when someone dies, and they will, we decide to roll it out everywhere? As long as there’s profit in it!
That’s the problem. No one wants to test Ai like that. Just dive right in and use it, I’m sure it’s great!
There some people gonna die
But that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make
And some politicians will get off scot free with the “WeLl It WaSnT Us iN CoNtRoL oF De aI!1!” Line.
“I just saved big money that was being wasted paying controllers. Not my fault the computer killed a few people, maybe a couple hundred tops. You should go arrest that AI”
We just need one rich asshole in a private jet to crash due to ATC failure for them to care.
I tried to use AI to install a reverse osmosis water system yesterday, I asked it to look at manual for hose colors to match them, I figured it would save me a few mins.
After an hour of it not working and trying all sorts of nonsense I looked in manual to have it show me it had given me all the wrong information to a simple task.
I can’t wait to have people’s lives reliant on this technology.
I just saw an ad for using ChatGPT to “come up with new recipes and baking ideas”
Yeah I’m sure having a bunch of people decide to eat whatever a hallucinating AI comes up with isn’t going to be dangerous at all…
I’ll look it up and try to find it. But I’m pretty sure there’s a YouTube video where they actually did ask Chat GPT to come up with new recipes and baking ideas and then they tried to make them to the results you would expect.
Edit: ok, so it looks like there are a whole lot of YouTubers making AI recipes to the expected results. So Google away.
AI is a pretty big catch-all term. If they mean specially designed and trained deep learning neural nets, maaaaybe it’ll be okay. If they mean typical LLMs we’re straight up fucked.
Exactly. With a broad enough term those computerized screens showing the position of all the planes is “AI”.
The next 9/11 will be AI powered. A.I. Qaeda is a truly terrifying prospect.
