Tag Archives: Innovation

R&D Is Local, Global, But Not National

By Robin Hanson · March 7, 2013 10:45 am · Comments (15)

A recent Post article by Brad Plumer illustrates what is wrong with the usual research funding arguments:

One of the few things Republicans and Democrats have been able to agree on in recent years is that the government should be spending more on basic scientific research … Thanks to budget pressures and the looming sequester cuts, federal R&D spending is set to stagnate in the coming decade. …

As a result, scientists and other technology analysts are warning that the United States could soon lose its edge in scientific research — and that the private sector won’t necessarily be able to pick up the slack. “If you look at total R&D growth, including the corporate and government side, the U.S. is now at the low end … We’re seeing other countries, from Germany to Korea to China, make much bigger bets.” …

There’s a long, long list of world-changing innovations that can be traced back to federally funded R&D over the years. .. The key question here is how much of this innovation might have happened without government involvement. … Many economists agree that private companies tend to under-invest in very basic scientific research, since it’s hard for one firm to reap the full benefits from those discoveries. …

When the Congressional Budget Office reviewed the evidence in 2007, it concluded that government-funded basic research generated “substantially positive returns.” And it found that, on the whole, government R&D helped spur additional private-sector R&D rather than displace it. … The United States will soon spend less on all types of R&D as a percentage of its economy in the coming decade than countries like Australia and South Korea …

The sanguine view is that other countries are tossing more money at scientific research that will have positive spillover benefits for the entire world — including us. If China invents a cure for cancer, we all benefit. Others worry, however, that the U.S. economy could suffer from the fact that a greater share of research is happening elsewhere. (more)

Note the conflicting arguments: each small part of the world invests too little in R&D, because other parts gain without paying, but the US should fear falling behind nations that invest more. These two only makes sense together if the nation is the natural scale for innovation – innovations mostly leak away from their source within a nation, but mostly stay within each nation. The academic literature, however, suggests the natural scales are global and local – while there are gains to the world as a whole, gains are focused on related industries in the local area:

A recent body of empirical evidence clearly suggests that R&D and other sources of knowledge not only generate externalities, but such knowledge spillovers tend to be geographically bounded within the region where the new economic knowledge was created (Griliches 1992). That is, new economic knowledge may spill over, but the geographic extent of such knowledge spillovers is limited. … greater geographic concentration of production actually leads to more, and not less, dispersion of innovative activity. (more; see also and also)

While it would be great if the world could coordinate to promote R&D spending worldwide, there is little economic justification for forcing Wyoming and Louisiana, who spend 0.4% and 0.56% of GDP respectively on R&D, to pay for R&D spending in Massachusetts and New Mexico, where those figures are 5.49% and 7.65% (source), any more than the rest of the world pays for such spending. If the US government funds less R&D, it will be mainly states like Massachusetts and New Mexico that suffer, not states like Wyoming and Louisiana, relative to the rest of the world.

If R&D spending mostly helps the particular regions in which it happens, why do we pay for it at the national level? Probably because many see it as a national prestige good – people in Wyoming look good to foreigners by being in a nation where lots of impressive research happens in Massachusetts. Are they right, or is Massachusetts just getting a nice juicy transfer?

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US laissez-faire serves a greater global good

By Robert Wiblin · January 28, 2013 10:39 am · Comments (61)

Liberals across the developed world are very concerned by inequality within the United States, as demonstrated by global interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is peculiar because poverty within the United States is less common, and less severe, than it is in most countries around the world. The US does have a high level of inequality for a developed country, but it is not extreme by global standards Unfortunately, this disproportionate concern for Americans leads to attempts to narrow income inequality that may increase poverty and inequality worldwide. [1] I’ll explain how.

The US has long been one of the most innovative countries in the world, and exports the technologies it develops everywhere it can. This is, at least in part, due to its relatively cut-throat culture and laissez-faire economic system. Low taxes and ungenerous welfare mean the benefits of working hard, taking risks and making it big, are higher in the US than most other developed countries. More importantly, weaker regulation in the US means incumbents are less protected from competition, and talented people can more easily start new firms and overturn the status quo. Conversely, daring entrepreneurs are less rewarded in countries which redistribute a great deal of wealth to the poor, or build thickets of regulation that unintentionally (or intentionally) slow down disruptive businesses and technologies. While tempering the ravages of the market may on balance improve the welfare of current Americans, doing so is likely to lead to less experimentation in science, equipment, software, art, business models and so on.

Such innovation generates enormous and enduring positive externalities because the successes are copied at low cost across the world and enrich everyone’s lives. Economic theory would predict that coordinating to stimulate more of these costly but invaluable innovations would be a major concern in international diplomacy. But for some reason it is not, and so it is up to individual countries and the people within them to take these risks on behalf of us all.

Miserly social security and weak regulation in America at most harm 0.3 billion people as long as such policies persist; any resulting innovation spillovers help the remaining, poorer 6.7 billion for centuries to come because improvements in technology persist and compound over time. We all continue to benefit from the hard work of those who developed the telephone and prompted the development of an ever-growing number of related products.

This is not to say that the Occupy movement does not have some important points; it is crucial to oppose the US’s many ‘crony capitalist’ policies which enrich the wealthy while also stifling competition and creative destruction. [2] Nor would the ideal necessarily be a minimal government; there is a prima facie case that government investment in education, R&D, natural-monopoly infrastructure, and so on, can spur technological change. Unfortunately, a higher and higher share of US government spending is going to the opposite: the military, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits and pensions. These programs are not investments in the future, and generate few if any positive spillovers for future Americans and the rest of the world. And because these programs are funded by taxes on the hard-working and successful, they blunt the incentives to invent things that help the whole of humanity.

Anyone who cares about lowering poverty and inequality, and doesn’t believe that American citizens are dramatically more important than everyone else, should think carefully before encouraging the US to follow the European economic model. If the US were go even further and slip into the sclerotic ‘extractive‘ economic model found in most of the developing world and some of southern Europe, it would be a global catastrophe. Resisting any movement in this direction is one way that heartless US conservatives are inadvertently more compassionate than they look.

Update: Turn out I’m I’m not the first person to notice this problem!

Update 2: Many people below doubt whether the US is more laissez-faire, and whether a laissez-faire model does as a general rule foster innovation. If you doubt these things, at least take away the point that whichever policies you think do stifle innovation, whichever countries they are found in, are much more harmful than they first seem. I will research and write up more on the topic of which broad economic settings lead to the most innovation in the future.

[1] The effect on wealth inequality is unclear, but the effect on ‘welfare inequality’ is likely to be negative.

[2] Though perversely, lousy healthcare policies have led to very high prices for medicine in the US, which has driven investments in new procedures and drugs, which have been borrowed by other countries. My guess is that effort probably would have been better directed at other industries.

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Ask Questions That Matter

By Robin Hanson · January 22, 2013 9:50 pm · Comments (28)

I know a lot of people who think of themselves as intellectuals. That is, they spend a substantial fraction of their free time dealing in ideas. Most of these people are mainly consumers who take in ideas, but don’t seem to do much with them, at least as far as anyone else ever sees. But others are more outward facing, talking and writing about ideas, often quite eagerly.

Oddly however, most of these idea dealers seem to define themselves mostly in terms of the answers they want to promote, instead of the questions they want to answer. Most idea-oriented Facebook status updates seem like this – saying yay for some answer they agree with. The few that deal in questions also seem to be mainly promoting them, saying yay for the sort of people who like that question.

Now yes, in addition to question-answering the world also needs some answer indexing, aggregation, and yes, sometimes even promotion. And yes, sometimes the world needs people to generate and even promote good questions. But my guess is that most intellectual progress comes from people who focus on a question to which they do not currently know the answer, and then try to answer it. Yes, people doing other things sometimes stumble on a new answer, but in general it helps to be looking in order to find.

I also know lots of academics, and they all have one or more research topics. And if you ask them they can usually phrase these topics in terms of questions they want to answer. And this is a big part of what makes academics more intellectually productive. But alas, few academics are able to articulate in much detail why it is important to the world that their questions get answered. They usually just invoke some vague associations, apparently considering it sufficient that some journal is willing to publish their answers. They seem to think it is someone else’s job to decide what questions are important. Unfortunately, most academic journal articles are answering pretty uninteresting questions.

So the important intellectual progress comes down to the rather small fraction of intellectuals who both define their focus in terms of a question, rather than an answer, and who bother to think about what questions actually matter. To these, I salute, and bow. They are the sweet thirst-quenching fount of progress.

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A History Of Foom

By Robin Hanson · January 20, 2013 12:00 pm · Comments (15)

I had occasion recently to review again the causes of the few known historical cases of sudden permanent increases in capacity growth rates in broadly capable systems: humans, farmers, and industry. For each of these transitions, a large number of changes appeared at roughly the same time. The problem is to distinguish the key change that enabled all the other changes.

For humans, it seems that the most proximate cause of faster human than non-human growth was culture – a strong ability to reliably copy the behavior of others allowed useful behaviors to accumulate via a non-genetic path. A strong ritual ability was clearly key. It also helped to have language, to live in large bands friendly with neighboring bands, to cook and travel widely, etc., but these may not have been essential. Chimps are pretty good at culture compared to most animals, just not good enough to support sustained cultural growth.

For farming, it seems to me that the key was the creation of long range trade routes along which domesticated seeds and animals could move. It was the accumulation of domestication innovations that most fundamentally caused the growth in farmers, and it was these long range trade routes that allowed innovations to accumulate so much faster than they had for foragers.

How did farming enable long range trade? Since farmers stay in one place, they are easier to find, and can make more use of heavy physical capital. Higher density living requires less travel distance for trade. But perhaps most important, transferable domesticated seeds and animals embodied innovations directly, without requiring detailed copying of behavior. They were also useful in a rather wide range of environments.

On industry, the first burst of productivity at the start of the industrial revolution was actually in the farming sector, and had little to do with machines. It appears to have come from ”amateur scientist” farmers doing lots of little local trials about what worked best, and then communicating them to farmers elsewhere who grew similar crops in similar environments, via “scientific society” like journals and meetings. These specialist networks could spread innovations much faster than could trade in seeds and animals.

Applied to machines, specialist networks could spread innovation even faster, because machine functioning depended even less on local context, and because innovations could be embodied directly in machines without the people who used those machines needing to learn them.

So far, it seems that the main causes of growth rate increases were better ways to share innovations. This suggests that when looking for what might cause future increases in growth rates, we also seek better ways to share innovations.

Whole brain emulations might be seen as allowing mental innovations to be moved more easily, by copying entire minds instead of having one mind train or teach another. Prediction and decision markets might also be seen as better ways to share info about which innovations are likely to be useful where. In what other ways might we dramatically increase our ability to share innovations?

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Reasons To Reject

By Robin Hanson · December 26, 2012 10:30 am · Comments (18)

A common story hero in our society is the great innovator, opposed by villains who unthinkingly reject the hero’s proposed innovation, merely because it requires a change from the past. To avoid looking like such villains, most of us give lip service to innovation, and try not to reject proposals just because they require change.

On the other hand, our world is extremely complex, with lots of opaque moving parts. So most of us actually have little idea why most of those parts are they way they are. Thus we usually don’t know much about the effects of adopting any given proposal to change the status quo, other than that it will probably make things worse. Because of this, we need a substantial reason to endorse any such proposal; our default is rejection.

So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place – we want both to reject most proposals, and to avoid seeming to reject them just because they require change, even though we don’t specifically know why they would be bad ideas. Our usual solution: rationalization.

That is, we are in the habit of collecting reasons why things might be bad ideas. There might be inequality or manipulation, the rich might take control, it might lead to war, the environment might get polluted, mistakes might be made, regulators might be corrupted, etc. With a library of reasons to reject in hand, we can do simple pattern matching to find reasons to reject most anything. We can thus continue to pretend to be big fans of innovation, saying that unfortunately in this case there are serious problems.

I see (at least) two signs that suggest this is happening. The first sign is that my students are usually quick to name reasons why any given proposal is a bad idea, but it takes them lots of training to be able to elaborate in any detail why exactly a reason they name would make a proposal bad. For example, if they can identify anything about the proposal that would involve some people knowing secrets that others do not, they are quick to reject a proposal because of “asymmetric information.” But few are ever able to offer a remotely coherent explanation of the harm of any particular secret.

The other sign I see is when people consider the status quo as a proposal, but do not know that it actually is the status quo, they seem just as quick to find reasons why it cannot work, or is a bad idea. This is dramatically different from their eagerness to defend the status quo, when they know it is the status quo. When people don’t know that something actually works now, they assume that it can’t work.

This habit of pattern matching to find easy reasons to reject implies that would-be innovators shouldn’t try that hard to respond to objections. If you compose a solid argument to a particular objection, most people will then just move to one of their many other objections. If you offer solid arguments against 90% of the objections they could raise, they’ll just assume the other 10% holds the reason your proposal is a bad idea. Even having solid responses to all of their objections won’t get you that far, since most folks can’t be bothered to listen to them all, or even notice that you’ve covered them all.

Of course as a would be innovator, you should still listen to objections. But not so much to persuade skeptics, as to test your idea. You should honestly engage objections so that you can refine, or perhaps reject, your proposal. The main reason to listen to those with whom you disagree is: you might be wrong.

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AI Progress Estimate

By Robin Hanson · August 27, 2012 11:00 am · Comments (28)

From ’85 to ’93 I was an AI researcher, first at Lockheed AI Center, then at the NASA Ames AI group. In ’91 I presented at IJCAI, the main international AI conference, on a probability related paper. Back then this was radical – one questioner at my talk asked “How can this be AI, since it uses math?” Probability specialists created their own AI conference UAI, to have a place to publish.

Today probability math is well accepted in AI. The long AI battle between the neats and scruffs was won handily by the neats – math and theory are very accepted today. UAI is still around though, and a week ago I presented another probability related paper there (slides, audio), on our combo prediction market algorithm. And listening to all the others talks at the conference let me reflect on the state of the field, and its progress in the last 21 years.

Overall I can’t complain much about emphasis. I saw roughly the right mix of theory vs. application, of general vs. specific results, etc. I doubt the field would progress more than a factor of two faster if such parameters were exactly optimized. The most impressive demo I saw was Video In Sentences Out, an end-to-end integrated system for writing text summaries of simple videos. Their final test stats:

Human judges rated each video-sentence pair to assess whether the sentence was true of the video and whether it described a salient event depicted in that video. 26.7% (601/2247) of the video-sentence pairs were deemed to be true and 7.9% (178/2247) of the video-sentence pairs were deemed to be salient.

This is actually pretty impressive, once you understand just how hard the problem is. Yes, we have a long way to go, but are making steady progress.

So how far have we come in last twenty years, compared to how far we have to go to reach human level abilities? I’d guess that relative to the starting point of our abilities of twenty years ago, we’ve come about 5-10% of the distance toward human level abilities. At least in probability-related areas, which I’ve known best. I’d also say there hasn’t been noticeable acceleration over that time. Over a thirty year period, it is even fair to say there has been deceleration, since Pearl’s classic ’88 book was such a big advance.

I asked a few other folks at UAI who had been in the field for twenty years to estimate the same things, and they roughly agreed – about 5-10% of the distance has been covered in that time, without noticeable acceleration. It would be useful to survey senior experts in other areas of AI, to get related estimates for their areas. If this 5-10% estimate is typical, as I suspect it is, then an outside view calculation suggests we probably have at least a century to go, and maybe a great many centuries, at current rates of progress.

Added 21Oct: At the recent Singularity Summit, I asked speaker Melanie Mitchell to estimate how far we’ve come in her field of analogical reasoning in the last twenty years. She estimated 5 percent of the way to human level abilities, with no noticeable acceleration.

Added 11Dec: At the Artificial General Intelligence conference, Murray Shanahan says that looking at his twenty years experience in the knowledge representation field, he estimates we have come 10% of the way, with no noticeable acceleration.

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Innovation Is Random

By Robin Hanson · May 12, 2012 8:30 am · Comments (10)

A dramatic, and sad, example of how random innovation can be:

A blowtorch flame is barrelling onto its surface to no effect. The egg should have cracked apart within seconds under the blistering heat. Yet after a few minutes, McCann picks it up and holds it in his hand. “It only just feels warm,” he says. He cracks it open and out dribbles a runny yolk. “It hasn’t even begun to start cooking.” That was March 1990, and this remarkable demonstration on the British TV show Tomorrow’s World was about to transform [Maurice] Ward’s fortunes.

The egg itself was nothing special. Its extraordinary resistance to the blowtorch’s heat came from a thin layer of white material that Ward had daubed on its shell. An amateur inventor, … Ward had concocted the stuff with no scientific training and named it Starlite. … Subsequent tests in British and US government labs confirmed that it was the real thing. …

Over the next two decades, Ward made a handful of samples of his material, but always refused to reveal the recipe. Then, in May 2011, he died. … A former hairdresser, in the 1980s [Ward] reportedly ran a small plastics company in northern England. He was also an English eccentric with a white beard, a bow tie and a divergent mind. He told journalists he made some batches of Starlite on his kitchen table in a food processor. ..

Greenbury believes that Ward was never interested in the money. His thinks Ward wasn’t able to relinquish the role of expert. By passing on the responsibility for Starlite to trained scientists, Greenbury suggests, Ward would have lost this coveted status. (more)

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Ideals Can Conflict

By Robin Hanson · January 28, 2012 4:10 pm · Comments (11)

The usual wisdom says we are most creative when working in groups that avoid criticism. This is wrong:

His book … was published in 1948. … Osborn’s most celebrated idea was … the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The single most important … was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. … Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became a popular business guru. …

But … brainstorming … doesn’t work. The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. … Groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientist gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. … The solo students came tip with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” … Numerous follow up studies have come to the same conclusion. …

Nemeth … divided two hundred and sixty-five female undergraduates into teams of five. … The first set of teams got the standard brainstorming spiel, including the no-criticism rules. Other teams were told … “Most studies suggest that you should debate and criticize each other’s ideas.” The rest received no further instructions. …The brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, but teams given the debate condition were the most creative by far. On average, they generated twenty per cent more ideas. And after the teams disbanded, … brainstormers and the people given no guidelines produced an average of three additional ideas; the debaters produced seven. …

“There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings. … Well, that’s just wrong.” (more)

Since the usual wisdom has resisted robust data for so long, it must be that people want to believe it. But why?

First note that we tend to believe this more about other people, and less about ourselves. It is a good idea for a good cause non-profit, or perhaps for our firm somewhere at some future date. But when we have a big immediate problem we really want to solve, we rarely invoke this process. So we believe this more in far mode.

Second, we tend to believe that idealistic things go together. For example, if art is good and peace is good, then art must promote peace, peace must promote art, and so on. Third, since far mode is more idealistic and less analytically critical, in far mode we are more willing to set aside analytic doubts to believe the simple correlation that all good things go together. Fourth, since we are especially creative, social, and uncritical in far mode, and we see all of these as idealistic good things, we are especially willing to believe that they all go together.

We are more idealistic in far mode, and all else equal far mode tends to promote idealistic things. So in far mode we tend to think all idealistic things promote each other. Peace, art, relaxation, positive moods, agreement, cooperation, altruism, creativity, love, etc. But in fact, there are usually tradeoffs – some ideals come at the cost of others.

Interestingly, the article I quote above goes on to talk about patterns of interaction that promote productivity, and it repeatedly just assumes that whatever promotes productivity promotes creativity. For example:

People who worked on Broadway were part of a social network. … The density of these connections [was] a figure he called Q. … A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q. … The relationships among collaborators emerged as a reliable predictor of Broadway success. When the Q was low … the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. … But, when the Q was too high, the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.

Note that this just assumes that a musical’s success is mainly a tradeoff between communication and innovation. Since a successful musical is good, and innovation and communication are good, then musicals must be good because of their innovation and communication. But lots of things that influence success could correlate with how many people you know on Broadway.

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Religion Gets Bad Rap

By Robin Hanson · January 21, 2012 10:50 am · Comments (75)

Indonesian police say a civil servant who posted “God does not exist” on Facebook faces a maximum penalty of five years behind bars for blasphemy. … He was attacked by a mob on his way to work. (more)

I’m an atheist, and dislike mistreatment of atheists. But I also have to admit religion often gets a bad rap. For example, I’ve been reading more science fiction than usual lately, some old and some new. I notice that they almost all include the trope of religious folks trying hard to hold back progress, often via terrorism. Perhaps this was once fair, but it doesn’t seem remotely so today. (And I don’t see it listed among other science fiction tropes.)

When religion helped turn foragers into farmers, it paid a lot of attention to sex. So religious folks still care a lot about sex, and have resisted sex-related techs, such as birth control, abortion, and IVF. But those techs are pretty old today, and only abortion remains strongly opposed. Yeah there are stem cell treatments, but that is a pretty tiny fraction of medicine.

A science fiction author from fifty years ago might have imagined strong religious oppositions to VCRs or the internet, because they aided porn. Or to cell phones with cameras because they allow sexting. Or to all sorts of “unnatural” medical techs. But overall, religious folks today seem just as pro-tech as others.

That doesn’t mean we don’t erect social barriers to new techs. But instead of being religious, most barriers today are regulatory and risk-based. As we have grown rich and eager to regulate each other, we have become more risk-averse and made it harder to introduce new disruptive techs. For example, computer-driven car tech is basically here and ready to go, but it will be a long time before we allow it. Same for automated flight and medical diagnosis,

Alas science fiction authors are reluctant to blame over-regulators as their anti-tech villain. Religion makes a safer target – most sf readers like regulation, but few are religious. Also, we tend to overestimate the importance of doctrine and dogma, relative to habits of behavior. Most religious dogma is silly and doesn’t meet our usual intellectual standards. But it also doesn’t much influence behavior. In fact, religious folks tend to have exemplary behavior overall. They work hard, are married and healthy, avoid crime, deal fair, help associates, etc. While it may seem plausible that people with crazy beliefs would do crazy harmful things, the opposite seems to apply in this case.

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Over-Regulated Flight

By Robin Hanson · December 3, 2011 4:10 pm · Comments (25)

Over-regulation is delaying the automation of flight:

Time was when a uniformed man would close a metal gate, throw a switch, and intone, “Second floor- men’s clothing, linens, power tools …” and the carload of people would glide upward. Now each passenger handles the job with a punch of a button and not a hint of white-knuckled hesitation. … And back in the day, every train had an “engineer” in the cab of the locomotive. Then robo-trains took over intra-airport service, and in the past decade they have appeared on subway lines in Copenhagen, Detroit, Tokyo, and other cities. …

Automation … runs oceangoing freighters, the crews of which have shrunk by an order of magnitude in living memory. … Today, the U.S. military trains twice as many ground operators for its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as pilots for its military jets. Its UAVs started off by flying surveillance millions, then took on ground attack; now they are bering readied to move cargo and evacuate wounded soldiers.

In the sphere of commercial flight, too, automation has thinned the cockpit crew from five to just the pilot and copilot, whose jobs it has greatly simplified. Do we even need those two? Many aviation experts think not. ….

Still, UAVs have yet to find a place in even the humblest parts of the aviation business – surveying traffic jams, say, or snooping on celebrity weddings. Such work has not yet been approved for routine purposes, even when the aircraft is small and controlled by a human on the ground. …

Technical problems are hardly the entire explanation. The military has proved this time and again. … For nearly two decades, automatic landing systems have been able to drop and stop a jet on the fog shrouded deck of an aircraft carrier. … “There’s no harder job for a pilot than landing on an aircraft carrier.” …

Pilotless commercial flight is overdue … Civilian UAVs could easily and profitablyt be deployed to survey infrastructure and carry cargo. … Already, … an airliner’s software typically takes over flight secods after takeoff, handles the landing – and most of what happens in between. The pilot just “babysits.” … Global Hawk .. is able to fly itself home and land on its own if it loses its satellite link with its ground station. ..

As significant as the technical hurdles are, however, by far the biggest impediment to pilotless flight lies in the mind. People who otherwise retain a friendly outlook toward futuristic technologies are quick to declare that they’d never board a plan run by software. (more)

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