We live in a world in which trust in professional classes is still relatively high. We trust in our attorneys to get us out of legal troubles, we trust in our doctors to help us with our medical problems, and we trust in our pilots to get us safely to our destinations all over the world. But just like with everything else in life, there is a growing movement among artificial intelligence experts to create airplanes where there is no human pilot necessary. While such an airplane would no doubt be extremely efficient (no sleep deprivation, no hangovers and no mistakes), it might have issues with passenger acceptance. After all, how much can we really trust technology, which has no creativity and may only do things according to rigid, pre-programmed routines?
The nature of artificial intelligence is that it responds to variables using its pre-set series of programmed routines. These routines can be extremely complicated, and the systems are designed to use these routines perfectly every time. There is no “sneeze” that could cause the plane to suddenly take an oblique angle toward the ground. And there is also no fatigue which would cause the system to suddenly go off for a few hours, causing the plane to fly around aimlessly and possibly even overshoot its destination by a couple of hundred miles (as has been documented in the past, with humans at the helm).
But of course, we humans have this tendency to trust more in our own species than we do with anything else. While a dog could deliver our mail, we still use mail men. And while a chimpanzee could conduct our brain surgeries, we still prefer a human surgeon for the task. At this stage of the game, it seems fairly unlikely that the average passenger would be especially keen on having a computer system do our flying. After all, it puts a whole new shine on the term “computer crash.”