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[–] 87 points 2 weeks ago (30 children)

I mean, this is potentially a good area where AI could augment human judgement.

Leave the human in control and have the AI note to them if they made an error or forgot about a plane or something.

Do not try and make it “self driving” or something.

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  • [–] 105 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    Luckily the people in charge seem to have great judgement with this sort of thing

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  • [–] 21 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    If you ever do stand-up, put me down for a ticket.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 weeks ago

    Depends on what level of "in charge" he means.

    The career people who have run these things regardless of party in office have tended to be pretty good, historically.

    Of course now many of these positions have been reclassified so that political stooges could be put in.

    It's unclear which level is actually implementing this and how much the Nero administration has their stupid, incompetent hands in it.

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  • [–] 32 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    AI, possibly. Algorithms, yes. Generative AI, fuck off all the way back to reddit where the training data came from.

    High reliability organizations need deterministic tools that can be trained on so that operators can understand how they will work. They do not need an AI black box that might distract them with a hallucinated situation in the middle of a critical moment.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    No one said this was generative AI, though. Which is good, because it's not an LLM or genAI

    AI/ML has long been used successfully to help predict future issues based on information from previous issues. It's one of the things it excels at over humans, because it can process a much, much larger pool of data than a human can.

    plus, AI is just a bunch of algorithms in a trench coat.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    It's called Machine Learning. AI is synonymous with LLM crap now.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (4 children)

    It's actually called Symbolic AI, which codifies clearly defined rules and behaviors - think decision trees and flowcharts. I doubt machine learning will be used in this case, since the rules and reasoning used by air traffic controllers have evolved over almost a century and are well understood. Machine learning is more for situations where the software has to discover the best way to operate because the rules aren't well established.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    Give it few weeks, and they have collected meteics that the AI did the job just as good as the human within that timeframe. A few weeks down the line, the tables have turned, the humans are in charge of notifying the AI if it makes errors. A few weeks later, metrics will show that humans hasn't really notified anything, and humans are removed from their position, leaving the AI fully in charge.

    Within a year, a critical halucination or a job which AI lacks experience to handle will happen and a very preventable accident will occur. The owners will shrug it off as something that would definitely happen with humans in charge, and that the reduced costs outweigh the additional risk.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    "Hallucinations" are produced by LLMs, which wouldn't be appropriate for air traffic control. Automations of this type are done with Symbolic AI (aka "classical" or "logical" AI). Symbolic AI is built from sets of rules and conditions used by human beings to make the same decisions. This type of AI has been widely used in all kinds of control systems since the 1970s, and is completely unrelated to ChatGPT and other LLMs except by being called "artificial intelligence".

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago

    Yes, because people don't tune out when they have a machine doing most of the work. This is ridiculously stupid and dangerous. Don't do work for them in trying to reason around it.

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    [–] 45 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    "AI" is such a terrible blanket term. Is this an LLM only? Will there be an actual machine learning model with hard checks doing the decision making? If the latter, I could see it largely working out. If the former ... lol

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  • [–] 29 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Nope, it doesn't even have an LLM component.

    It just uses a ton of current and historical data to detect potential route and congestion issues.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago

    This is something we have been doing for a while with the aid of computers. There has been a multi-year upgrade plan for this system in the works as well. Someone (Duffy) decided to take the already planned upgrade and just call it AI.

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  • [–] 35 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    The fact that anyone is willing to set foot on an airplane in the United States with the current administration running things is astounding to me.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 weeks ago

    My wife keeps talking about wanting to fly up to New England this year, but I'm not setting foot in an airport until I po longer run the risk of being sent to a concentration camp.

    But, this program has nothing to do with LLMs or GenAI. It's just good ol' fashioned machine learning.

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    [–] 34 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

    AI ≠ LLM

    There are a bunch of other types of AI/ML that aren't hallucination engines.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

    Well, at least comments in this thread can be excused because it doesn't link to an article, just a stupid fucking reply.

    WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING: AI will be used in the predictions about flight frequencies. IT WILL NOT BE IN THE TOWER.

    (At least not yet. Which is what the articles are about. So at least realize that if you're joking/speculating/bitching about ATC in the tower with AI, that's not what this is)

    I understand the HYPER ANTI-AI sentiments, but jesus christ people, try reading about what's actually happening, yeah?

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    [–] 18 points 2 weeks ago (12 children)

    This is actually a genuinely good idea since they're not using LLMs to do it. It's a very narrow problem that can be modeled and trained just like chess. Air traffic controllers can focus on the "shit's hitting the fan" events

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  • [–] 18 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    Yeah "artificial intelligence" research was going on for at least half a century before LLMs, but the clueless will see this headline and think OMFG ChatGPT is GoNnA RuN tHe AiRpOrT!!1!

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (4 children)

    Yeah, it's like people that thought Facebook was the Internet they now think ChatGPT is AI/ML. Here they actually can synthesise tricky situations where a pilot ignores instruction, comes in too fast and even if shit hits the fan automatically put in "circle around at x elevation while we focus on the emergency landing" command.

    I read some time ago that air traffic control is pretty chaotic under the hood and having even just a minimal model that flags "problematic" sounds to me like a major upgrade.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    It doesn't help that 95% of these headlines do actually refer to LLMs. I've spent enough time on here repeating exactly that I hate the conflation of LLMs with AI in general (and the lack of acknowledgement that "AI" has never been well defined), and I still read that headline and thought "oh god no".

    Still hoping that the LLM bubble collapsing frees up a lot of both expertise and computational capacity to work on actually useful models like this one.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago

    I knew the headline wasn't the full story, but that's better what I expected (LLMs with a deterministic verification method before making decisions to prevent hallucinations from causing plane crashes.)

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    [–] 15 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    Didn't US defund some air traffic security thingy a few months ago?

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  • [–] 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

    FAA and the entire industry needs a proper modernization. $100 trillion (theoretical) was the said figure following the 2025 Potomac helicopter incident . Instead of funding or defunding, the current administration just attempted to employ ICE in place of TSA workers, other airport positions, and air marshals positions.

    edit: trillion = in theory, no source available

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    “It’s not a crash. It’s an opportunity.”

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    As if i needed another reason not to fly

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (1 child)

    Hooray for having a flight-heavy vacation in two weeks! It's been real fellas.

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