Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

by Hannah Fry

Among the pilots at Air France, Pierre-Cédric Bonin was known as a ‘company baby’.40 He had joined the airline at the tender age of 26, with only a few hundred hours of flying time under his belt, and had grown up in the airline’s fleet of Airbuses. By the time he stepped aboard the fated flight of AF447, aged 32, he had managed to clock up a respectable 2,936 hours in the air, although that still made him by far the least experienced of the three pilots on board.41 None the less, it was Bonin who sat at the controls of Air France flight 447 on 31 May 2009, as took it off from the tarmac of Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport and headed home to Paris.42 This was an Airbus A330, one of the most sophisticated commercial aircraft ever built. Its autopilot system was so advanced that it was practically capable of completing an entire flight unaided, apart from take-off and landing. And even when the pilot was in control, it had a variety of built-in safety features to minimize the risk of human error. But there’s a hidden danger in building an automated system that can safely handle virtually every issue its designers can anticipate. If a pilot is only expected to take over in exceptional circumstances, they’ll no longer maintain the skills they need to operate the system themselves. So they’ll have very little experience to draw on to meet the challenge of an unanticipated emergency. And that’s what happened with Air France flight 447. Although Bonin had accumulated t...