The human mind and a computer are exactly the same. They process one thing at a time based on what they have been taught, what they have learned along the way, and the information they are being given. The only difference (so far) is the capacity.
As I said, John, it's not a situation you're ever going to have to deal with, nor will you most likely ever see it. But if you could talk to the people we talk to here who are actively working on these concepts and for whom it is their very real vision of the future, you would soon see that fully automated commercial flight is not only a goal, but it is an achievable goal. Not by your view of things, but your view of things will eventually become extinct. That is not an insult, it's simply generational and evolutionary reality.
I have no idea what general aviation will become. It would not surprise me if it eventually disappears entirely. The commercial pilots it produces will no longer be needed, for one thing. And look what the little toy quad-copters have done in just a couple of years. If it's going up in the air that people want, they can do with an out-of-the-box toy today.
When I worked at times supporting the Hawaii Five-O crew (the original show, not the current one) the rig they used in Hawaii for aerials was a Cessna 206 or a helicopter with a Tyler mount to support the 35mm film camera and a Dynalens to stabilize the image. This rig was huge, heavy, cumbersome and cost several hundred thousand dollars (not including the plane or the helicopter).
It was the standard of the industry and if you'd told those crews that someday you'd be able to buy a little plastic quad copter and HD camera for a few thousand dollars and it would do a better job than their monster 35mm film camera/Tyler Mount/Dynalens/helicopter rig they'd have called you a nutcase and laughed you off the lot.
We've recently been working with some absolutely brilliant grad students from universities like Purdue, Georgia Tech, BYU, and others. They are designing and building planes (including the world's largest to-date 3D printed plane which actually isn't all that large) as their capstone projects sponsored by companies like Boeing and others.
They are totally enamored of flight and designing and building airplanes. This program has been going on for some years now and a lot of the graduates have been hired by us and other aerospace companies.
They absolutely light up when you talk to them about what can be done with aircraft and how efficient they can be made and so on. But they have no interest in becoming pilots. We've asked them about that and their view is that's an old-fashioned thing to be doing so why waste time doing it? Instead, they are looking for ways to create flight without the necessity of having to learn to operate the machine.
It's an easy thing to nay say and if I didn't have the job I have at the company I have it at I'd be sounding exactly like you. Fully-automated flight will never happen, I'd be saying, and I'd list all the same reasons you have listed, and I'd firmly believe them.
But I don't feel that way anymore. It's on its way, with undeniable economic, environmental, and safety motivations behind it.
It's being done to a degree now. We (Boeing) have a surveillance drone that has been used by the military in the Middle East conflicts for some years now. Unlike the big Predators, this thing is not "flown" by anyone other than itself. It's told where to go and conduct surveillance, it's launched, it conducts the flight all on its own for up to a fair number of hours, it can make some fairly basic decisions while it's doing it, and when it's done it comes back. It can be commanded to go somewhere else partway through the flight and it breaks off and goes there. It actually cannot be hand-flown but instead is "told" what to do through it's command system.
Now, compared to fully-automated, totally self-sustaining flight in which the aircraft makes all the same kinds of decisions a human crew would make, this thing is really crude. But it works, works reliably, and has been doing so now for a number of years. And every upgrade it gets makes it even "smarter."
By the way, the flying car worked just fine as far as the machine goes. But a market never developed for it. Why? Because the "driver" would have had to learn to fly and that's involved and expensive and "everyman" was not very interested. And you're right--- the vision of people flying around by the millions and crashing into each other is laughable. Hell, they can't even do it very well on the ground in two dimensions, let alone in the air in three dimensions. But that doesn't mean the concept won't work. It means THAT concept won't work. The solution--- remove the people from the control of the machines.
If you can create a personal transportation device that flies, is safe, and that the user doesn't have to learn to fly but only has to learn to turn it on and tell it where to go, THAT will have a market.
You don't have to be intelligent to fly. Birds have been flying far better than we do for a bazillion years. You just have to learn to do the right things at the right time. If you make a machine that will do the right things at the right time, you immediately eliminate all the unpredictable variables that make humans absolutely crappy at doing stuff that has to be done right the first time.
Machines--- computers if you will--- don't get all moody and decide to glide-bomb the plane they're flying along with everyone in it into the side of a mountain because they're feeling especially sorry for themselves that day, for example.
I fully understand and appreciate where you're coming from, John. In the world we live in right now, that is the logical view to take, no question. But in 50 or 100 years or whatever, the world will be nothing like the world we live in right now, at least technologically.
And the people who are designing and building and operating the planes of that world will look at the planes of this world and the people who operated them in the same way that a twelve year old kid today with a new quad copter and HD camera would regard that that Hawaii Five-O aerial crew from the 1970s with its massive film camera and stabilizing system and full-size helicopter and all those expensive (and fallible) people it took to operate and support it.
That twelve year old kid would probably say, when shown a photo of that rig, "Those guys were frickin' nuts to do it like that." And he'd run off and launch his little quad copter and shoot aerial shots that the Hawaii Five-O crew could not have conceived as even being possible to do.
Finally, speaking of flying cars and the desire to move around more quickly, even that desire is going away fairly quickly in terms of work. One of the things that's pretty mind-blowing to watch is the way engineers are starting to work. Instead of engineer A doing something, it gets passed to engineer B, who does something and then passes it on to engineer C, and so on--- the current linear way of doing this kind of work--- all these people are working simultaneously on the same thing at the same time on the same 3D CAD system.
So while one person is working on a piece of the structure the electrical engineer who has to run a cable through that piece of the structure is right there working out with the structures person how best to do what needs to be done.
But what's cool is that--- thanks to global connectivity--- none of these people need to be in the same place to do this. I've watched engineers in one city working with engineers in another city who are in turn working with engineers in another country, all of them talking together, looking at the same CAD display, all in real time and working on the design simultaneously.
The bottom line? Design tasks that used to take weeks or even months are being done in days. And you can bring together any kind of collaboration team you need. You want a computational fluid dynamics whiz from India (they lead the world in that technology) and an aero guy from Seattle, no problem. The time zone thing notwithstanding, you can get them together working on a design or specific aspect of a design together on the same display in real time. And because you are putting together collaborative teams with a totally diverse makeup, you get better decisions and better designs.
As the baby boomers are walking out the door of this company with their retirement packages shaking their heads in skepticism the millennials and younger generations are coming in the door and rubbing their hands with glee and saying, okay, NOW the cool stuff is going to start happening.
It's an absolutely fascinating transition to watch.
And... even though neither one of us will probably be around for me to be able to tell you "I told you so," fully automated, safe air transportation will not only be a reality, but people eventually will not even be able to fathom how it could have been done any other way.
