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Health & Fitness

Are We Safer With Computers or Humans?

On one day recently, July 6th, three died and 50 were seriously injured when a Boeing 777 crashed and burned while landing in San Francisco, and the same day unattended rail cars full of petroleum products broke away and rolled into Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, Canada, destroying the town.

The papers and television offer up a daily diet of such stories.

Increasingly, what they have in common is the dilemma they present regarding automation. Planes can fly themselves. Trains can use automatic braking systems. Cars that drive themselves are already on the road, though not yet marketed.

In the opening scene from the 1983 movie "War Games," two soldiers in a missile silo watching over ICBMs targeting Russia, receive what they believe to be orders for an actual launch. Before the end of their countdown, one finds himself unable to turn the key that he believes will cause the death of millions. Administrators decide the solution to this kind of rebellion is to just "get the humans out of the loop."

The investigation isn't complete, but it would seem that the 777 crash was at least in part the result of the fact the glide path from SFO was not in operation, and a relatively inexperienced (with that model) pilot wasn't using the automatic pilot. Similarly, we don't know the details of the railroad disaster, but it also may have involved, in part, some substitution of improperly set manual brakes rather than the automatic braking system.

Would we all be better off leaving to the computers what they can do better and more consistently than can be done by humans? And, if so, what are the implications of that?

For more on this subject, see "Getting Humans Out of the Loop; What Can 'War Games' Teach About Disasters?"





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