Martin Owen wrote:
"Phillip C's note on airline pilots. There are a number of professions
where technology has led to diskilling and still retain high status. It
think airline pilots come into a similar category as pharmacists who may
spend large ammount of their time counting pills and dispensing bottles of
potions made a great distance from their own dispensory (unlike times
past). However in both cases when the "midden hits the windmill" they
carry a lot of responsibility .
Thereis much here in terms of labour legislation, restrictive practices,
professionalism and protectivism, and the status of the employmeny which
other workers have not enjoyed."
This is a very significant point. Technology is supposed to eliminate the
dangers of human error. What it actually does is reduce the frequency of
critical incidents due to human error, but does not eliminate them. Whether
or not technology ever can do this is moot, but certainly for the
foreseeable future the Pareto costs of eliminating the last 20% of errors is
too high.
The consequences of this are profound - in aviation at least, and I suspect
in the other fields that Martin alludes to as well. What is happening with
highly automated aircraft is that the frequency of critical incidents is
going down, but the proportion of them that result in disaster is
increasing. Consequence - safety gains rather lower than predicted.
There are three main classes of reason for this:
(a) Pilots become so convinced of the infallibility of their technology that
they refuse to believe other signs that the technology is malfunctioning or
otherwise not coping with the actual critical situation. (Probably a factor
with the Singapore Airlines Taipei 747 accident)
(b) the reverse of (a) - a refusal to believe that the information being
provided by the technology could be correct. (Probably a factor in the Gulf
Air airbus crash earlier this year).
(c) Attentional lapses due to boredom, with the result that small indicators
that deviation from normal aircraft performance has occurred, and a
consequent failure to take corrective action in time to correct a dangerous
situation. (Probably a factor in the American Airlines 757 accident in
Colombia)
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
P
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