And you might also want to ask the GOP why Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers and banned them from federal service for life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

>On August 5, following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, the Reagan administration fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life. In the wake of the strike and mass firings, the FAA was faced with the difficult task of hiring and training enough controllers to replace those that had been fired. Under normal conditions, it took three years to train new controllers. Until replacements could be trained, the vacant positions were temporarily filled with a mix of non-participating controllers, supervisors, staff personnel, some non-rated personnel, military controllers, and controllers transferred temporarily from other facilities. PATCO was decertified by the Federal Labor Relations Authority on October 22, 1981. The decision was appealed but to no avail, and attempts to use the courts to reverse the firings proved fruitless.

My late friend Ron Reisman worked at NASA Ames Research Center on air traffic control and flight safety, and he hired up a bunch of the professional air traffic controllers who Reagan fired, and taught them to program.

Because it's much easier to teach an air traffic controller how to program, than it is to teach a programmer how to control air traffic.

And we have them to thank for how safe the air traffic control system is today.

https://www.nasa.gov/50th/Folklife/biosPropulsion.html

>Ron Reisman has BA in Philosophy and Classical Greek, and an MS in Computer Science. He joined NASA Ames Research Center in 1988 as one of the original members of the Center Tracon Automation System development team. Since the late 1990s he has worked on traffic flow management research and development. He is currently supporting the Next Generation Air Traffic System research.

I saw him give an earlier version of this talk at the November 1989 Usenix Montery Graphics Conference, where he discussed training air traffic controllers to program, and he subsequently gave me a tour of the flight simulators and air traffic control systems at NASA Ames:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix02/usenix02.pdf

>INTRODUCTION TO AIR TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

>Ron Reisman and James Murphy, NASA Ames
Research Center, and Rob Savoye, Seneca Software

>This introduction to air traffic control systems summarizes the operational characteristics of the principal Air Traffic Management (ATM) domains (i.e., en route, terminal area, surface control, and strategic traffic flow management) and the challenges of designing ATM
decision support tools. The Traffic Flow Automation
System (TFAS), a version of the Center TRACON
Automation System (CTAS), will be examined. TFAS
achieves portability across platforms (Solaris, HP/UX,
and Linux) by adherence to software standards (ANSI,
ISO, POSIX). Software engineering issues related to
design, code reuse, portability, performance, and
implementation are discussed.

Based on what I know about Ron's and other people's diligent methodological work on air traffic control and safety, I feel extremely safe and confident flying, and I find it insulting to his memory and the legacy of his work when the armchair architect ex-Facebook employees on this thread (and the GOP) glibly and patronizingly implore the FAA to "move fast and break things", as if they had no idea how many lives and fortunes are at stake.

Here's a video of Ron showing Marvin Minsky the flight simulator, an early AR headset, and the hydraulic lifts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOKENF_-z8Y

I previously mentioned his earlier work making Apple ]['s talk with dolphins, and his thoughts on AI and dolphin intelligence:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32039126

To answer "What is AI?" you first have to answer "What is I?"

Check out the Apple ][ at the Dolphin Research Center in 1982, and Ron Reisman’s thoughts about dolphin intelligence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWHCTNztnwQ&t=392s

“It’s gotten to the point that I never say anything about intelligence in general. I don’t know what it means any more. I used to. But then I started trying to test it. And if you think about it for a while, you don’t know what it is.” -Ron Reisman