What

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

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.

"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

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

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

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.

Yeah, DC has notoriously simple traffic with absolutely no heavily documented issues and shortcomings. Nothing of note in the last few years at all. It's a great idea to test new shit there, this can only go well.

AI ≠ LLM

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

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.

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.

It's not an LLM or GenAI if that's what you were thinking.

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?

Although actual self driving cars are already better drivers than humans, although the bar is so low that Satan would have to dig for it.

Note, Teslas are not self driving. They're mislabeled lane assist.

I know a good deal about machine learning. Machine learning’s principle metrics define how inaccurate it is.

The sheer volume of air plane traffic means you will have constant mistakes in those predictions. Leading to short staffing and actual consequences.

Staffing is not what they've said they're using it for. Coordinating scheduling of flights to reduce waiting and conflicts is what I recall seeing.

They are extremely short staffed. Training takes 3 to 5 years. Very few eligible candidates and the Federal work force issues. This isn’t problem they can solve, because the problem is them, not the system.

Which has nothing to do with this.

Definitely, there needs to be so much more info provided before anyone here could make a reasonable judgment

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

Then you have to say Machine Learning out front or everyone is going to assume you mean an LLM

I think we can all agree there are multiple aspects of a system as complex as aviation coordination in a large metro area that should be evaluated and improved upon when possible. I don't understand how what you're saying relates to what you're replying to

Better drivers than the average human driver. Take male drivers out of the equation and it tips. Women drivers may be less secure at times (compared to male overconfidence) but they are far less likely to be reckless or cause lethal accidents.

Signed: a male :p

Yes but none of them should be let anywhere near decision making.
When we talk driving assistants that actually work, those are driven by a hard set of rules, with deterministic decision making.

Just wait til the next government shutdown. All AI baby. They don’t need canned goods or toothpaste.

No, it still doesn't tip.

A computer can't get intoxicated, tired, or distracted. Humans can't monitor dozens of sensors millions of times a second.

There are definitely still steps that need to be made to advance the technology, but it already has us beat. And it's great. Traffic related deaths are a huge issue.

What's not great is who owns the cars.

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

Bon voyage, and, uh..bonne chance..

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.

Thank you.

I guess they will have to train less people possibly. But idk their full reasoning in replying with that.

When they are trained for a specific task, they do noticably better. Hallucinations aren't guaranteed to never happen but it is a lot closer to pure accuracy with niche AI. LLMs that you see are made for pleasurable conversation. AI/ML other than LLMs can become really to the T. I've seen YouTube videos testing such.

"Land all planes nose to nose, so every other plane lands backwards, otherwise it looks like a DEI."

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.

It's like Ubuntu vs firmware. One is made to be able to do a ton of things, and one is made for a very specific purpose.

AI being used by incompetent people trying micro mange their failure will not end well given the circumstance.

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.

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

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!

"This was irresponsible behavior from me, and a betrayal of trust. I have adopted strict safety protocols to ensure that this cannot happen again"

. . .

< does it again >

"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".

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.

I reemeber when the Canadian military combined ATC and air defence. Both scope dopes controlling aircraft.

One keeps the dots apart and one brings the dots together.

Data might be corrupted.

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.

"noticably better" than what? You need to ask yourself that question.
Machine learning solutions should never be in control of any irreversible actions. Slowing down a car due to perceived danger? Okay, worst case driver has to accelerate again (emergency braking decisions must not be made by such a system either to avoid being rear-ended). Swerving to avoid an obstacle? Absolutely not!

As I said in another comment: There are driving assistants that work deterministically. Anything else can give visual or auditory clues but shouldn't be allowed to control much if anything else.

The question of how good an ML system is, is irrelevant as they are non-deterministic by nature, and their legitimate use cases are elsewhere.

Human drivers: people die due to reckless driving and human mistakes - and in most situations a good driver can anticipate a lot of dangers and avoid them.
ML "assistants" getting control over cars: people die of unpredictable mis-assessments of inputs vs. outputs, and there's no way to anticipate any danger or try to avoid it.

People who advocate for non-deterministic systems taking control in cars are irresponsible and have blood on their hands.

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.

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

The streaming Mayday! Air Disaster channel is going to get its best comedic seasons.

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