Children of the Magenta

Thought-provoking mastodon thread from Dave Anderson on how automation failed pilots in the 90s, and how we may be making the same mistake again with software development:

Today I'm thinking again about the "Children of the Magenta" lecture. In the late 90s, airlines realized that after going all-in on automation and flight assists in the 80s, they had trained a generation of automation-dependent pilots who were no longer capable of dealing with novel situations in which the automation couldn't help, or failed. Children of the magenta flight path line on the computer.

I'm thinking about it because someone this morning bragged about letting LLMs write the code.

The parallels are interesting. In the automation boom, airlines told pilots that in the future, they would not fly planes. They would be merely automation managers, providing high-level instruction to the computer, the actual pilot.

In 1997, when the Children of the Magenta lecture was recorded, automation dependency was a significant factor in 68% of airline accidents.

They didn't get rid of the automation, but they did go back to teaching pilots how to fly the planes, without the automation...

The Children of the Magenta lecture: youtube.com/watch?v=WITLR_qSPX . The quality of the AV isn't great due to age and restoration, but the contents is well worth it.

That's only some of it, I recommend reading the whole thing.