Innis Cunningham writes: > The only thing with this rush to efficiency and the discarding of > humans is. How many computers buy cars,televisions,houses,airline > tickets or another computer. And once computers have eliminated > the humans from the workforce who is going to buy the goods the > computers produce.Oh that's right there won't be any humans then > LOL.
Most of the jobs people did 100 years ago have disappeared -- a single farmer can do the work that once took 20 farm hands, most assembly lines are automated, heavy construction machinery allows a single person to dig the foundation for a house, cheap household appliances mean that none but the wealthiest people have servants, etc. -- but still we don't have 95% unemployment. People keep finding new jobs to replace the old ones, and the new ones tend to be safer and higher paying -- even the poor (in industrialized countries, and many developing ones as well) are far more affluent than they were 100 years ago. The wealthiest countries tend to be the ones who have done the most automation, because they're the ones with the highest productivity per worker; the least automated countries, where people do much more by hand, tend to be the poorest. That said, automated systems have to work properly, and for areas like ATC or actual aircraft control, they have to work with mind-numbingly high reliability. Systems, whether run by people or machines, take time to design, a lot of time to implement, and much, much more time to debug. The design for our current ATC system and rules of flight is written in the blood of tens of thousands of crew members and passengers who died finding the small flaws and oversights in what had seemed like a pretty good system to begin with. We'll have to go through that pain again to some extent when the world automates the system, but it would be nice to minimize the damage as much as possible. I'd like to see 100% automation proven in easier areas, like ships and trains, first -- if they cannot do it, then we shouldn't be planning to automate flight yet. All the best, David p.s. I'm not sure which David you were referring to, but I don't fly for a living, just for fun. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users
