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Aurini comments on Research methods - Less Wrong
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"It doesn't feel planned."
This made me think of a noteworthy corollary: airport control towers.
In the United States air traffic control is heavily regulated, and as a consequence the technology used is straight out of the 1970s - moving about little scraps of paper. In Canada, on the other hand (apparently we're more economically free than the US? http://www.heritage.org/index/ ) there is less regulation, and the entire process is computerized.
For those of you who watch Breaking Bad, the disaster at the end of Season 3 probably wouldn't have happened if the US adopted a similar system.
I think that 'planned' is a fallacy; systems as complex as Hospitals and Airports resist central planning, allowing the troops with their feet on the ground to design their own solutions often leads to a better result. I'm reminded of the time I worked at Bell Mobility's Engineering dept - the only rule I had to follow, expenses wise, was "You cost the company twice what you're paid per hour - if hiring outside is more efficient, go ahead and do it." The entire office was loose and deregulated, and gosh darn, did we ever get things done!
Distributed decision making will occasionally result in 100 different researchers using $12.50/hour temps when pooling their resources would give them a computer programmer for less, but the hours spent in coordination would be expensive. On the other hand, the inefficient paper/electronic organization you bring up feels like the hallmark of over-regulation.
To quote Robbie Hanson, "Coordination is hard!"
When I saw that episode, my first thought was that it would be extraordinarily unlikely in the US, no matter how badly ATC messed up. TCAS has turned mid-air collisions between airliners into an almost nonexistent type of accident.
After writing that I thought "Actually, it probably still would have happened, because it's such a great plot element." Rule of Cool.
No; ATC is completely computerized en-route, and heavily computerized at control towers. Directions given by voice are being transitioned to directions given via texts. I've done work for NASA in that area. (FAA uses NASA to do ATC research for historical reasons, basically as a way not to have to fire a bunch of people after the moon landings.)
I have seen the strips of paper for tracking flight plans... I don't remember if they still use those. I won't swear that they don't. But it wouldn't make any sense, as all that information is in the computer.
It is not, however, autonomous. There are still humans in the loop, which is a terrible safety hazard. Every year, air traffic controllers make over 10,000 errors serious enough to be logged and investigated. Of course, one mistake made by a computer is much more horrible and newsworthy than 10,000 comparable mistakes made by humans.
This recent video by Reason Magazine would disagree; it argues to let a private corporation control Air Traffic (as in Canada), instead of bowing to the Unions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaPvJlPnc6E
I'm just going by what Nick Gillespe is claiming, but I've found Reason to be honest in their reporting and generally critical in their thinking,
As a kid, I used to kill time in the LaGuardia TRACON ferrying around the paper strips to the controllers (and stacking up the plastic slides in pyramids & whatnot); I'm not sure the last time I went in, but I'm fairly sure it was between 1998 and 2001 (9/11 closed the TRACON to visits by controllers' kids).
That's interesting if correct. I would have guessed that this is due to NASA's existence as NACA. Are you sure this is that late an addition?