Ed Mullan posted:I'm sure that there are a few folks who were very happy that Captain "Sully" could handle his aircraft in a very unusual situation....
Ed, I'm glad you mentioned Sully. I had not thought of that wonderful example. If this had been a pilot-less "autonomous" aircraft, everyone aboard it would be dead now, along with a lot of people on the ground.
These emergency situations are the kinds of things that technology simply cannot deal with, no matter how advanced it might be. Inevitably there will be situations presented to a vehicle (truck car, train, aircraft, whatever) that the software was not written to deal with.
The biggest, most perplexing problem presented to any software engineer is that of "error checking." What happens when things don't go as they should? Error checking within a software program has to anticipate EVERY POSSIBLE ERROR that could occur and have a routine written to deal with it.
Anticipating EVERY POSSIBLE ERROR in ANY software program is absolutely impossible. This is the "dirty little secret" that the technology proponents don't want to talk about.
