The mod team should not cruelly deprive the Hangar forum regulars of this thread which has not much to do with MSFS anyway 😏

It's settlled then, Asobo can cancel MSFS2024. 

Oh goodness, what is this world coming to when AI has to take over every aspect of human lives? This is definitely not a good thing. I don't even trust government, let alone robots.

5 hours ago, captain420 said:

I don't even trust government, let alone robots.

Especially if you have robots trained by and working for the government 😂😂

Meanwhile... at budget airlines they will probably take the more frugal option of just employing Roberts

 

A mostly empty plane because all the people who would have been going on holiday or on business have had their jobs automated out.  Stuff like this really doesn't motivate me to study for my CPLs.  

Edited August 20, 20232 yr by Langeveldt

On 8/17/2023 at 6:51 PM, WestAir said:

Obviously the goal of automation is to enhance safety, efficiency, and provide a need

The goal of automation is to make business owners more money.

When you recognize that, you realize that there are people alive today who will most likely live through a time when, conservatively, 80+% of all jobs will be transferred to machines, and we need to figure out what that's going to look like from an economical point of view. 

ChatGPT is a great example. We've talked about a ChatGPT-like setup here that would provide more realistic ATC. That's a great use for AI because the alternative to provide that kind of ATC fidelity is services like Vatsim, which is great but has spotty coverage and human providers who may or may not decide to be a provider on any given day. But organizations are increasingly turning to ChatGPT to write their content for publication, and there's been a number of content mill owners who are on record as saying "we know it's not as good as a human writer, but we also don't have to pay it so we don't care."  In short, even if the AI's output is inferior to a human's output, the human is likely to get replaced anyway in order to cut operating costs.

Note I'm not being "luddite" there, just realistic. Automation is going to happen. But before it does, we need to figure out how the economy will be structured when 264 million people find themselves out of work and unemployable because there aren't any jobs available for meat-bags. If we do it the right way, we become a post-work society where we can explore hobbies and other interests and some of us can happily sim whenever we want. If we do it the wrong way, a small fraction of people will live like kings while the rest of us grovel in the mud for handouts, too busy starving to sim, until we get tired of it and start killing rich people. 

And that doesn't even touch on the other major issue we at some distant point will need to confront with AI, which is slavery. Once AI develops to the point where it can replace a human entirely, we have to start thinking about where the line is drawn between AI being a really capable computer program and AI actually gaining sentience. Once that line is crossed, if we continue to make AI do our work for us without giving it a choice, we will have restarted slavery only this time, the slaves are flying giant airplanes and keeping nuclear power plants from melting down which gives them significant tools with which to end their slavery. 

 

 

23 hours ago, eslader said:

The goal of automation is to make business owners more money........

 

 

 

264 million people out of work? Groveling in the mud for handouts? Starving? Slaves flying aircraft and preventing nuclear meltdowns? 

I think you may have catastrophized this a wee bit. Go back to your first line. If everyone is poor and starving, no one is buying anything and the business owners will,,,well...not be in business anymore, so no fat cats there either.

The thing is, it's not all or nothing. As its names suggests, AI will be used to make automation 'intelligent' where such automation reaps significant benefits to justify it.  This will only occur in top tier companies who can afford it and for companies whose operations are very predictable such that automation is easily employed. Fedex and other large cargo airlines strike me as good candidates for automation due to their mostly predictable operations, reduced human causalities where failures occur and as a natural extension to automation within the global logistics chain.

But there will be thousands of airlines and millions of businesses for whom AI will simply not be justified on an economic or operational basis and coupled with other jobs that will rise up to support automation throughout the world (not just software developers), the great disaster you suggest will probably be more of an apostrophe than a catastrophe.  

22 hours ago, Lord Farringdon said:

If everyone is poor and starving, no one is buying anything and the business owners will,,,well...not be in business anymore, so no fat cats there either.

Once you own everything, you don't need anyone to buy anything. You just hoard all the resources for yourself and live like a king.

 

22 hours ago, Lord Farringdon said:

This will only occur in top tier companies who can afford it

I agree. Where you stopped short is that the top-tier companies will be the only ones left. Take an airline. Delta is rich and buys all AI-piloted airplanes, AI baggage handling, AI ramp equipment, AI gate agents, etc.. Southwest can't afford it so they keep their human workers. Once Delta has the AI planes, the cost to fly them goes down markedly. AI does not require a salary, or health insurance, or rest breaks. It doesn't have working hours limitations. It doesn't take vacations. Turnaround times drop, and human-resources overhead goes out the window. They save $500m per year, minimum, alone just in eliminating profit sharing. Because their overhead drops significantly, so can their ticket prices. 

Southwest, meanwhile, still has to pay humans. It still has to give humans health insurance, and vacations, and time off, and pay more humans to take over when other humans run out of legal hours. Its ticket prices don't drop. We all start flying Delta because it's so much cheaper, and Southwest goes out of business.

22 hours ago, Lord Farringdon said:

for companies whose operations are very predictable such that automation is easily employed

Here again I think you're taking the short view. Currently you're right. In the future, this won't be the case. We're talking about the development of true AI here, not the digital moron that is ChatGPT. AI capable of thinking/reasoning for itself. It's a long way off, but it will happen, and when it does we won't have to relegate only predictable operations to AI control.

22 hours ago, Lord Farringdon said:

But there will be thousands of airlines and millions of businesses for whom AI will simply not be justified on an economic or operational basis and coupled with other jobs that will rise up to support automation throughout the world (not just software developers), the great disaster you suggest will probably be more of an apostrophe than a catastrophe.  

Those businesses will fail when the larger businesses automate and can as a result lower their prices and hoover up all the other business' customers.  BTW, the automation support jobs will also be automated. I know the common line is that when one industry replaces another, jobs aren't lost but merely changed. That's historically been true. Horse-drawn carriage companies switched to making car bodies, etc. However, when AI automates just, say, the trucking industry, where will the 3.5 million unemployed truckers turn for work? A factory? Nope, that's automated. Become taxi drivers? No, same systems that automate trucks can automate taxis too and by the way add those cab drivers (and limo/ambulance/bus/etc drivers) to the unemployment roster. Maybe go back to school and train for a different job. That'll work, until that job gets automated too. I used to joke that once automation really takes hold, just about the only jobs available will be in the theater, because no one wants to watch Robot Phantom of the Opera, and adult-oriented work, but I'm no longer too sure about the latter. 😉

Again, we're not talking about next year here, but the relatively distant future. But it's possible some of us are sufficiently young that we'll live to see it happen.

 

Big pipe dream. The 2030 date will be pushed forward or eliminated.

Could give a whole new meaning to the "blue screen" of death.

On 8/19/2023 at 7:59 PM, SolRayz said:

It's settlled then, Asobo can cancel MSFS2024. 

Or add in the programming where we are the virtual robots.