ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
"Everything is the worst!"
The $50 Billion Bloodbath: Why Airline Operations Control Centers Will Be Ghost Towns by 2030
- Thread starter Karee
- Start date
///AMG
Well-Known Member
Not everything. This is about the only thing I would call "the worst". Or at least what I would call the worst of all bad things.
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
I get it, like, the new paradigm is scary, but honestly, if things don't get overtly terrible over the next decade I think things are going to be awesome - and despite the flak doomers throw out all the time, if you look at most measurements, things are demonstrably better than they were a couple decades ago. Progress is winning, and a lot of the backlash to it is the result of how much it is winning. Basically, we could be close to post-scarcity and as was mentioned above - we can hop off the hamster wheel in that world without fear of death. The idea that we all have to work and slave away to survive (or even thrive) cannot coexist with a world with extremely cheap access to intelligence and "stuff" (for want of a better term).
It's going to take people actually wanting to hop off the hamster wheel though. Our lack of an imagination about how the future could be may be more of an actual threat than the technology. If we keep trying to make things stay the same things won't get better. We can make things better - we just have to want to. Which I think is a drum I've been beating on JC for almost a decade now.
given the rate of progression of the technology, and the political climate, do you really think that the current administration is going to employ this it in such a way that will entirely reorganize the socioeconomic framework of this country in a fashion that levels out inequality?
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a "dump program." We dump the things which destroy us as humans!
flynryan692
Well-Known Member
It's already that advanced. There are dozens of examples of AI processing multiple data points and making real time decisions. Hospitals are implementing AI for a range of uses including real time patient monitoring, autonomous radiology, and clinical decision support. Banks are analyzing transactions in real time for fraud detection. SpaceX, when they aren't blowing up on launch, uses AI to land when it returns to earth by analyzing atmospheric conditions in real time to adjust trajectories and optimize its flight path.
Listen, I love dispatch, but let's not pretend like AI isn't already making a meaningful difference in significantly more complex fields.
///AMG
Well-Known Member
I appreciate your optimism, really I do. And that all sounds pretty rad. It is also the exact opposite of how I see this going down. Greed smothers all kinds of good ideas and utopias. I do not see AI is a means to an altruistic and work-free world. It will usher in an era of incredible autocracy from a very few, who will hold the masses as servants. I hope I'm wrong, but I really don't think I will be.
Well that's a bold prediction.
LaCorderaVoladora
Well-Known Member
TXAce
Well-Known Member
I don’t disagree that AI is making “meaningful differences in significantly more complex fields.” I do, however, disagree with the OP on LinkedIn who claimed that “OCCs will be ghost towns by 2030.” That statement is just fear-mongering, and it oversimplifies the role of dispatch by suggesting it’s one of the fields AI can easily replace in the next five years.
As others have pointed out, dispatch is far more than data entry. I believe we’ll use AI as a tool to enhance our work rather than have it take over completely. And yes, AI may eventually advance to the point where it could take over our field—but by the time that happens, it will have already replaced most other jobs, and we will be facing much bigger challenges than just the future of dispatch
I agree with some of what he is saying. There will come a time when automation takes over many aspects of operations in every industry. But this guys numbers make no sense. Someone help me understand.
In his most recent post he said:
“Companies will happily spend 200M to save 2B”
He is saying that all while suggesting companies will pay out to “former union members” a slice of the pie from the savings the company will have from automation. The 2B numbers comes from the “savings” a company will get by cutting all dispatchers. But somehow to compensate all the dispatchers the number only comes out to 200M? Or is he implying 2B savings by replacing the entire NOC?
Additionally he says it costs companies 500M per day due to strikes… dispatchers aren’t even allowed to strike. Nor would they for the most part. Dispatchers at mainline generally think of this career as a dream job. I can’t imagine anyone risking their career to do a strike when they’re already so well compensated.
In his most recent post he said:
“Companies will happily spend 200M to save 2B”
He is saying that all while suggesting companies will pay out to “former union members” a slice of the pie from the savings the company will have from automation. The 2B numbers comes from the “savings” a company will get by cutting all dispatchers. But somehow to compensate all the dispatchers the number only comes out to 200M? Or is he implying 2B savings by replacing the entire NOC?
Additionally he says it costs companies 500M per day due to strikes… dispatchers aren’t even allowed to strike. Nor would they for the most part. Dispatchers at mainline generally think of this career as a dream job. I can’t imagine anyone risking their career to do a strike when they’re already so well compensated.
Karee
Marginal Member
He’s nothing more than a grifter. Some of the statements are true but he’s selling a capitalist fantasy and undermining labor. Airline leaders will buy in only to their detriment.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
So the workers… owning the means of production… as protection against capitalistic greed? I swear I’ve heard this idea before…
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
And you'll be wrong
- that's fine, you're entitled to your opinions - but for autocracy to take hold literally everyone has to lay down and decide to let it take hold. I can promise you that at least one person in this thread will not lie down. They'll have to kill me first - which is fine - I've faced death before, I can face it again. No, this idea that people will simply bend over and take it is based on a reading of history that misses all the relevant context of the times - we don't even have real luddites yet. There's nobody setting fire to datacenters to "burn the looms" or whatever - we're actually doing this pretty chill so far. The catastrophism isn't warranted and instead of watching all this shell shocked and depressed (which, hey, I've been there, don't get me started on the climate) - I'm going to do something. First to protect my family, then second to build the version of the future I want to live in.This current milieu of • will pass. It may pass at great cost, but it will pass.
I think the road is going to be a little bumpy - but I think good times are on the way. I don't want to live in the world you're describing... you know, so I'm going to spend my time making sure it doesn't happen. I'm literally working on that presently. But there are no adults coming to bail us out - and if we want a better world we have to a) believe one is possible, and b) try to build it ourselves. If you really truly believe that the world won't get better and it's techno-feudalism then what are you doing about it? Are you doing the prepper thing? Are you running for office to try to change the policies that will be enacted? Are you actively taking responsibility for the future you are sure we are careening towards?
We cannot let "perfect" be the enemy of "good" either.
I guess this is turning into a bit of a rant - and that's fine, but pessimism is the wrong way forward through all of this. The web runs on pessimism - abandon that framework, because it's killing discourse.
Our brains are wired to be negative by the way. So, suppose you are talking with your friends and your you predict that things will be "great" - and they turn out crap. You look like an idiot right? The penalty for being wrong here is high - we don't want to look like an idiot.
Now suppose you are going to predict things will be bad and they turn out ok. Well, nobody considers you an idiot, you get a little egg on your face, but things continue on - the penalty isn't that bad.
Then what about predicting bad, and things come out bad? You look like a genius - you were "the guy" who predicted catastrophe!
Finally, what if you predict good, and things come out good. You look smart, but it is not as strong because of negativity bias. Largely nobody cares.
So for social situations (which we're now constantly in on the internet) what is your brain incentivized to do? Your best bet is to ALWAYS pick the negative bet if you are operating with uncertain information. Looking like an idiot is way worse than the magnitude of social "good" you experience by looking like a genius.
But the social reward of a "good prediction" is independent of the actual outcome. They really don't have much to do with each other. That's why you can have a youtube channel that's predicted 45 out of the last 4 economic downturns and people still subscribe. If you predict everything will suck constantly, well eventually something will suck and you can bask in that sweet sweet social glow. But, meanwhile we'll have missed all the opportunities to do well given the information you have.
And what information do we have? Well... a lot - and that's why I have an optimistic take on all this. First off, the geriatrics running our system aren't going to last forever - they're getting old. They ain't going to last forever. Second, the curves for the cost of compute, the capabilities of what these models can do (both language models and robotics models) is going through the roof and the costs are coming down - oh, and there's tons of open source models coming out. Third, if you zoom out about 20 years (well within our lifetimes) nearly every metric of human well-being is increasing. Fourth, along those same lines the cost of solar and green energy has been cratering - it's going to be cheaper for me to provide more solar than I could ever use IN AK than it is to put in a telephone pole - that's bananas. I could keep going - and that's not to say that there aren't terrible things happening - but focusing on those terrible things in a vacuum misses the overall trend. It's instrument fixation - if you hone in on the oil pressure gauge being in the yellow arc and fly the airplane into a mountain because you're not paying attention to the other stuff, well... you kind of miss the point.
Anyway, this is a wall of text - here's what I'm saying, some millenarian catastrophe, science fiction dystopia, or otherwise is not right around the corner. Things may get worse, but I'm pretty convinced given the data I have that they're going to get a lot better. If I look like an idiot for that - fine - I can look like an idiot, but I'm convinced and I'm going to put in the work to try to make things better where I can.
Just in my personal life, as an example, there's new treatments going into phase 3 trials right now that might be able to rejuvenate the damage to my sight. That's basically a breakthrough. I doubt I end up back in the cockpit again anytime - I'm sure OKC would fight me tooth and nail for that - but yeah, that was science fiction when I first got sick... I guess I'll leave this quote from Tolstoy from War and Peace:
///AMG
Well-Known Member
So what does the ideal end state of AI look like to you? Maybe not "end" as in forever, but describe the good stuff that you think is ahead.
As for what I am doing about it, I guess not using AI for anything. The ship has sailed, so I'm not stopping it, but I can keep it out of my own life, to the extent that is actually possible with it being basically forced on us (google search for example).
As for what I am doing about it, I guess not using AI for anything. The ship has sailed, so I'm not stopping it, but I can keep it out of my own life, to the extent that is actually possible with it being basically forced on us (google search for example).
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
Honestly? The end state that seems inevitable provided there are no major barriers are...
1. The vast majority of human labor replaced by AI and robot tooling. Especially as the inverted demographic pyramid becomes more and more of a factor in day to day life. But, basically, we have AI tooling do the work for the vast majority of jobs. We will be left to do what we want in our free time, but only after we come to the collective conclusion that slaving away to make Bob in accounting feel better about himself was stupid. We are left to focus on the things we find interesting - so like, art, science, hobbies, etc. As a corollary I suspect we'll see UBI or something similar to that emerge out of this.
2. Massive medical breakthroughs in pretty much every conceivable illness and ailment that is likely to afflict a human. Like, apparently just today we have a treatment for Huntington's disease? I bet we see a lot more bespoke therapies too. Like, if you have cancer, you don't do radiation or whatever, you take medicine that is tuned to YOUR specific cancer. This is already starting to be a thing, but a lot of it is based on decades of analytics and requires lots of compute to make work.
3. AI driven breakthroughs in science and mathematics leading to extremely interesting things humans can do with this newfound information.
4. The cheap price of smart AI agents means a sort of deflationary pressure on most if not all goods eventually.
Now, I think people worry about 1. because people have kind of really swallowed the whole "capitalist realism" sort of mindset. They can't fathom a world where you don't have to work in order to justify your right to exist - we haven't had that in centuries so nobody really knows how to even fathom what that will be like, but we're talking basically a post-scarcity world (there will always be things like the Mona Lisa or land that remains scarce), but if you get sci-fi enough, those sorts of limitations go away too. But I figure that after some years of figuring it out, we'll eventually navigate the minefield and get to something with UBI, or maybe UHI as some people are talking about. But basically - I'm not saying we're going to live in Cockaigne (and to a middle ages peasant we kind of already do) - but I think the quality of life will get a lot better for a lot of people.
That'll change - or you'll be using it without even realizing it. The new iPhones apparently use generative AI to help make the pictures better? I don't know - I'm leaning in. I'll learn the tools as they come out. I kind of used to be like you a little bit in this regard - I mean, I still use emacs to write code (and I really enjoy it) - but I recommned you check this cool science fiction story from 1989 (when people first started to talk about wild technological progress).
Duckduckgo for the win.
manniax
Well-met in the Ka-tet
I mean, the more I read of this guy's posts, the more obvious it is that he has never been a dispatcher - certainly not at a US airline. He has no clue as to everything our job entails. This is not to say that AI won't be coming, but his whole "your job will be automated AND SOON!" argument without any knowledge of how the 121 game works here is getting a bit tiresome. Everyone is entitled to their opinion I guess.
McCrosky
Well-Known Member
That tells me all I need to know to discount his grip on reality.
I admire your optimism. I’m a huge science fiction fan. And while there’s
much out there about the utopia that comes when humans stop their toiling and embrace peace and kinship and are provided by for the world government (very Marxist), there’s also the opposite where Humanity descends into distopia as the rift between the haves and have nots widen. Until the robots take over and enslave us all. As you mention we have to navigate the minefield to get there, what’s the acceptable human loss for those who have to transit over the mines?
I don’t think this AI revolution is all that is being made of it. It’s a tool, that’s all. In this context could OCC staffing be affected? Yes. Same way moving from spaghetti charts and sextants to software for flight planning affected staffing.
I’m not willing to bury my head and say this will never happen! I just think the original article crestor is selling a vision and trying to find some one to hand him a few 100 million to buy in. He of course gets a commission or stock I’m sure. And when it flops he still walks away and says “we cannot support that request” or “we need more money to support that request”. Seen it….
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
acceptable loss? None. I don't think that way. Like, how many pilot deviations or CFITs are acceptable in a career? I'd argue "none." But if you get enough people doing things you'll get some, so I think there will likely be loss. Hopefully we can come to our senses fast enough to realize the limitations of things.
I don't know, I just kind of want people to have a better life?
I doubt we get a world government out of things in the limit of what I'm talking about. Actually, most likely circumstance to me is a sort of withering of the state and state control. They'll just kind of be nobody in charge - or we'll put the AIs in charge, or who knows? I'm not a political scientist - we have one of those here though. My intuition is that it will get kind of bad, then really good as we cross certain thresholds of the availability of resources.
Really that's what it comes down to - the availability of resources. If we play our cards right we may get some sort of Star Trek utopia - though utopia is a funny thing, there will always be malcontents and further shores of progress. What did Oscar Wilde say? "Progress is the realization of utopias?" Maybe I'm misquoting him - but our life today is a utopia in many ways. But once the scarcity is mostly handled - or handled to a high degree, then we start seeing a radically different world and pretty quickly.
If you wanted me to nail down a real prediction, I'd reckon that we're all talking about UBI and UHI in the lead up to the next presidential election? That won't be practical though at the current tax rates? So that's going to be part of the platform. Also, the tariffs and general economic unease (see Powell's comments today) could see a major downturn in the market in the near term that slows research? But yeah, I bet we're dealing with the ramifications of much higher levels of unemployment by 2028.
If you want some fun reading check out this:
Introduction - SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead
Leopold Aschenbrenner, June 2024 You can see the future first in San Francisco. Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans. Behind the...
situational-awareness.ai