Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 10/86 - checked

October 1986

Now, this is something about which I don't know too much in terms of specific detail. But I know this guy who goes flying quite a bit and should know more than me. (I'm sorry, but this is turning into one of those hierarchically structured introductions).

Anyway, this guy that I know says he knows someone else who flies the big jets, you know the type of thing I mean, all wing and engines and three hundred seats with no legroom. These are beasts which really need no flying skills at all, these days. As this guy said to me about the subject, it is now possible to fly one of these brutes from London to somewhere interesting by the dubiously difficult task of pushing six buttons. Two of those, not surprisingly, are START and STOP.

I reckon I could do that, so I suggested to this guy that maybe I should apply for the job of airline pilot. After all, said I, if I can drive a computer keyboard to write stuff like this, I have definably proved that I can push buttons. QED, I am ideally suited and fully trained for the task.

It was then that he pointed out a small, very minor problem. Not only did I not have a pilot's licence, I have never ever flown a plane. I tried to protest that this was not necessary as it was now all controlled by computers, I just told them to start and stop..... even I could manage that, surely?

That was the easy part, I was told, but what would I do if the computer went wrong and the plane was in high speed negative elevation mode? My suggestion of combining a rapid scan of the manuals with a lethal mixture of incantations to the goddesses and large gins didn't rate highly as a probable solution to such a problem.

At this point I started to think about the problem just a little. It seemed, or so I was informed, that the way modern big jet airliners are flown these days is by computer. The pilot sits there and pushes a few buttons to make sure it starts, makes some course corrections en-route, lands and eventually stops. The pilot's prime responsibilities come down to some relatively easy functions, taxiing the beast around the airport and getting it lined up on the runway, ready for take-off.

After that, the job is simply to monitor the operation of the on-board computers and be there, with lots of expensive training predominantly going to waste, waiting and watching, just in case.

It was then that the thought struck me: this, as they say in all the best movies, just ain't right.

I have in my time flown a good many miles (at someone else's expense, usually) and the thought that I have been sitting somewhere seven miles above the ice-floes of the North Atlantic while some somnolent pilot just might be forgetting to stay awake long enough to watch the computer have a funny turn is just a trifle unnerving.

I am not sure that this is the way that computers should be used, mainly because it seems to be turning things upside down and back to front. It is a classic example of how we are making much of computers and their capabilities, and ending up putting all the reliance on them for our own responsibilities.

Up there in the aeroplane it is the computer that is doing the work, and the human being that is doing the monitoring, just making sure that things are going along OK and ready to take over should it prove necessary. Think about that for a second. It can be argued that is completely the wrong way of doing things. What if the computer that is flying the plane decides to go all peculiar just as the pilot decides to fall asleep from terminal boredom?

In practice, it should be the other way round. Being complete morons, computers haven't got the intelligence (even of the artificial kind) to become bored, so surely that tenacity should be utilised to monitor the human being at the controls, rather than the other way round. I have no objection to the computer having the capability of flying the plane should it need to as a back-up to the pilot. I just worry about the idea of the main back-up system being someone who might have a totally numbed brain from nine hours of doing nothing but sitting, just in case.

This philosophy of putting so much reliance on computers to do everything for us is starting to appear all over, especially as the idea of expert systems catches on. Now, as I have said before in these columns, I quite fancy the idea of expert systems, they are a great way of capturing and utilising precious knowledge.

One of the ways in which such systems can learn, of course, is by actually observing an expert doing a job. In the aeroplane, for example, the system could be programmed to learn what the pilot does and how. Certainly they are already being programmed to fly a plane, but can they be programmed to deal with all emergencies?. Currently the answer is probably no, which is why the human has to monitor the computer.

In the office, the 'umble PC is already proven as a great boon in any number of ways, but do we actually want it to do our jobs for us? I suppose that when it comes to working out an enormous spreadsheet the answer is probably yes, but that is relatively trivial in the great scheme of what things might be like in the future. A spreadsheet is much the same as using computers to help fly a plane in a `fly-by-wire' system.

Would we want the computer to not only enter the data into our spreadsheet, but chose which numbers should get the privilege? This is like having a word processor that actually does the writing. (OK, OK, there is no need to comment about that being a good idea. But just think, if the damned thing can write, it can also read, which might mean that eventually it might not require us at all).

All this is to pose the basic question: are we actually using all this wonderful technology we have created in the right way? It would seem that, having discovered that we can produce something that can do a particular job, we then abdicate from that responsibility ourselves. Taken to its logical absurdity, we may well eventually invent ourselves out of life, which doesn't seem to be the best use we can make of the best tool we've made.

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