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by CamperBob2 83 days ago
More like:

Me: Why don't we use radiation to treat cancer?

You: Radiation is dangerous

Me: Sounds like an excuse

You: OK, design a medical-grade synchrotron

Me: That's not how this works

You: LOL pwned

...insert specific example of currently intractable problem...

What makes the problem intractable? We can now do both voice recognition and synthesis at human levels, and any video game programmer from the 1980s can keep some objects from running into each other.

When an emergency is declared, keep the other objects in a holding pattern and give the affected object permission to land. Then roll the fire trucks. Preferably not routing both the trucks and another aircraft onto the same runway, as the humans apparently did here.
2 comments
dpark 83 days ago
It’s not weird that you believe automated ATC is possible. The weird thing is that you insist it’s simple.

People’s lives hang in the balance of a system built of corner cases. And you trot out radiation treatment as your metaphor? As if we didn’t royally fuck that up and kill a bunch of people at first.

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CamperBob2 83 days ago
The 'simple' remark was in response to your wide-eyed implication that 1000 takeoffs and landings per day is somehow a challenge for modern computing systems.

You'll lose this argument sooner or later. I just hope it happens before several hundred people find out the hard way that humans no longer have any business in a control tower. With your attitude, Therac-25 would have been seen as grounds to shut down the entire field of radiotherapy.

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dpark 83 days ago
Your “simple” springs from your assumption that the problem is easy and anyone who disagrees is dumb. This is also why you can’t hear any of the answers others have given you. You don’t want answers. You want to be “right”.

No one thinks that the difficulty with automatic ATC is that computers have trouble counting 1000 things.

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CamperBob2 83 days ago
No one thinks that the difficulty with automatic ATC is that computers have trouble counting 1000 things.

I mean, you're the one who said it...

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estearum 82 days ago
One approach that has always served me well in life is when someone appears to say something that seems obviously not true (like that computers can't count to 1000), consider whether I actually have misunderstood them.
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estearum 83 days ago
> What makes the problem intractable? We can now do both voice recognition and synthesis at human levels, and any video game programmer from the 1980s can keep some objects from running into each other.

Great point!

It must be that despite the reliability, obvious advantages, and accessibility to "any video game programmer from the 1980s", everyone else is just choosing not to do it.

Alternatively, these things are not as simple or as reliable as you, a person who has no familiarity with the problem, assumes them to be.

I guess we'll never know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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