https://gizmodo.com/the-faa-is-rolling-out-its-ai-air-traffic-tool-nationwide-2000839347
They also added some ai tool recently
the controllers retain the final decision on whether to accept SMART’s suggestions
I haven’t seen it, but I have a dread feeling that following a round of layoffs the workflow will end up in such a way that it would be time and resource prohibitive to fully investigate each and every suggestion, but keeping the illusion of a human in the loop will give them a fall guy to fire when things go wrong.
Wild how they started that then inexplicably the network collapsed due to massive excess traffic. The two could not possibly be linked though, no the AI was not at fault for introducing the traffic that collapsed the isolated network it must have been something else. Clearly.
fuck that was a trainwreck of a press conference…
And here I was thinking M$ taking out Outlook globally was going to be the biggest technical screwup we see this week.
Well, it’s Friday 13 after all! 😉
Truly lmao. But I’m sure glad they have their robust new AI-assisted Air Traffic Control system (“SMART”) to fall back on! How perspicacious of them to begin rolling it out yesterday!
Such a smart move! 🙃🤣
It could have been smart! Maybe it is, we don’t have any evidence except (one helluva) coincidence.
Route optimization is one of the solid uses for AI/ML. It was already tested and working in DC and parts of Florida. That’s how you implement a sane rollout. Test and check results. We shall see!
The initial rollout was Tuesday and should have been easily ignored if it went sideways.
“AI says this route is better.”
Fine. Humans still had to agree and implement. Money says it conflicted with an older system and something shit the bed.
That’s my assumption as well. Given they didn’t even bother to talk to the ATC union, I can’t imagine they spent much time figuring out how to integrate their fancy new AI with any of the absolutely critical legacy systems. SMART is supposed to be monitoring all the data, which means it has to plug into god only knows how many interfaces for systems still running shit written in FORTRAN 77. Cascade failure city…
I suspect a cascade failure as well. Being almost wholly ignorant, my plan would have been to implement the system on the side with no interface to “real” systems. “Read only”, if ya get me.
Somewhere out there, there’s a bunch of IT guys who won’t be getting much of a weekend this week.
Wtf is an electronic flight strip? A pager?
They’re talking about flight progress strips, which are part of a fully physical system ATC uses to track aircraft, literally moving strips of paper around on a board to keep everything straight.
Interesting.
