Thinking Machines: For Better and For Worse

Our machines get ever more intelligent, or at least capable of doing more and more complex tasks. Whether this should be considered intelligence is a separate question.  Last night, I saw two programs that brought this clearly into focus.

The first was the IBM Watson Challenge on Jeopardy. If you haven't been tracking this story, IBM has created a new computing system for its latest corporate Grand Challenge: a machine smart enough to understand Natural Language Processing (NLP).  In past Grand Challenges, IBM created a chess-playing computer it named Big Blue which was able to beat Grand Chessmaster, Garry Kasparov, and another computer dubbed Blue Gene (Big Blue + Genome) which was used to sequence DNA. For the current challenge, the IBM team named their computer Watson after IBM founder Tom Watson whose standing directive to his employees was "Think".  IBM's R&D lab wanted to take on a tough challenge and they felt that hardly anything could be tougher for a computer than being able to compete successfully on the television quiz-show, Jeopardy.  Who isn't familiar with the opening line, "This is Jeopardy!" with host, Alex Trebek (Disclosure Alert: we once sat in the studio audience of a filming of the show in LA. Our daughter chatted up Alex during the commercial break).

Watson was positioned at the center podium and competed against the two all-time high scoring contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Poor Ken and Brad. Watson's winnings over the three days of the tournament were $77,147 compared to Jennings' $24,000 and Rutter's $21,600.  Watching the show, I was impressed with how adept Watson was at answering questions filled with the usual twists on topics and language that are part of the Jeopardy game. But it was also clear that Watson got some things wildly wrong. His answer to a question about U.S. Cities was Toronto.  That seems like something that would have been easily ruled out in the programming of his logic circuits.  Nonetheless, Watson is an impressive advance in NLP and IBM now hopes to perfect the technology for many other fields including medical diagnostics.

The second program that I saw last night was Nova's "The Crash of Flight 447", which described in harrowing detail the final minutes of the Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic on the night of May 31, 2009.

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Nova assembled its own team of investigators to look into what might have caused one of the most modern aircraft in the skies, the Airbus A330, to  tumble out of the sky. The official investigation is still ongoing and the Black Box and flight recorder have yet to be found in 15,000 feet of water in the mid-Atlantic. My short summary to the longer description given during the program is that the computer flying the plane was instrumental in the crash.

How could that be? The longer sequence of events was that Flight 447 encountered a very turbulent thunderstorm in the mid-Atlantic that caused all three of its airspeed sensors (called pitot tubes) to ice up and fail.  The flight computer was in control of the aircraft and airspeed is a key parameter for the computer to perform its tasks. The lack of airspeed data caused the flight computer to start to go into a sequence of failure modes, starting with disengaging the autopilot and throttling back the engines.  The pilots were instantly thrust into an extremely challenging situation with multiple cascading computer warnings coming at them as they manually tried to control the plane in heavy turbulence.  Without accurate airspeed information, they were flying in an even more dangerous situation.  Modern jets have very narrow windows of acceptable airspeed at cruising altitude.  Changes in airspeed of as little as 10 knots either up or down can cause the plane's wings to stall (lose lift).  When an aircraft stalls, the plane not only begins to rapidly descend, it also can go into a roll that can make recovery even more difficult.

The Nova team did a good job of demonstrating how pilots are supposed to avoid this problem.  The Nova investigators recreated the conditions that the pilots of Flight 447 encountered that night in a flight simulator. The two pilots who "flew" the rerun did not know in advance what they were going to be facing in the simulator.  The rerun began with the thunderstorm suddenly showing up on their radar and progressed to the loss of airspeed data and the flight computer issuing failure warnings. The standard procedure for pilots in such a situation is to increase engine power to 85 percent and adjust the rear elevators to 5 percent up-attitude.  This always put the aircraft at a safe speed to avoid a stall.  The pilots in the simulator did just what they were supposed to do and all went smoothly as they recovered control of the plane. But apparently, the pilots on Flight 447 were too busy or too distracted to follow this standard procedure.  The result was the loss of over 200 people's lives in a terrible aircraft tragedy.

Some of the pilots interviewed on the Nova program commented on how today's generation of pilots have come to depend on the flight computer to fly the plane.  They have too little experience with how to pull an out-of-control plane back to safety if the flight computer fails.  Having seen the pilots in the flight simulator follow the standard procedure of thrust and attitude adjustment, I wonder why the flight computer wasn't programmed to do the same thing when the loss of airspeed data started a sequence of failures?  Why depend on the pilots for this first safety measure?  Why doesn't the computer just do it and then alert the pilots to what had been implemented as part of the safety program to maintain control?  The program made clear that the flight computers are currently programmed to prevent pilots from maneuvering the plane in some way that would cause loss of control.  Why not in the loss of airspeed data situation?

Clearly, we are still in the infancy of computer intelligence whether it be computers like Watson which understand the difficulties of how we communicate in our natural language or the more prescriptive computers that fly airplanes, manage nuclear power plants, or even control the inner workings of our automobiles.  Much more is needed and certainly will be built into the computers in the future to enhance what we like to call intelligence. Computers are being built to mimic what humans can do under the best of circumstances.  Surpassing what humans can do is what Ray Kurzweil, the computer and music guru, calls The Singularity.  He thinks it is coming in the next decade or so.  I am not so sure.  But I am sure that it will happen in the first half of this century.  Then, like the computer, HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we will be in a strange new world where the computer might say as it did, "I can't allow you to do that, Dave".  In the meantime, computers can be fun to watch or, under rare circumstances, they can create monumental tragedies.

[You can watch the entire Nova episode on the PBS website here.]

The Hindenburg Disaster

I came across some newsreel footage from the National Archives (via the Internet Archives) that show the disaster of the Hindenburg crash in Lakehurst, NJ on May 6, 1937.  This newsreel gives you some idea of what an 800 foot long airship looks like in flight. Ironically, the Hindenburg crashed exactly one year to the day following its maiden flight in 1936.

The interior of the airship was beautifully appointed as you can see in the photographs below.  At one point, it even carried an aluminum grand piano, although it was later removed to allow more room for passengers.

The Hindenburg had just completed its first Berlin - New York voyage of the 1937 season.  Due to bad weather, the airship had to idle for some hours before landing in Lakehurst, NJ (at the Naval Air Station which had mooring towers for large airships).  Everything was normal in the landing until the hydrogen-filled dirigible suddenly exploded near the tail section.  The entire craft was consumed in a minute and 35 of the 97 people on board were killed.  The images of the explosions shocked the world which had rarely witnessed a disaster unfolding in front of the cameras.  The cause of the explosion has never been determined.

Today, with video in our cellphones and with all our portable video cameras, capturing events as they happen is not nearly so rare an occurrence.  That doesn't mean that disaster is any easier to take now than it was on the Hindenburg's final day.

Rufus Porter and the Dream of Flight

A few days ago, I stopped into the Friends of the Library Bookstore at the Sarasota Library.  I found a little book (51 pages) entitled, A Yankee Inventor's Flying Ship, which had been published in a very limited edition back in 1969.  In the book, the Minnesota Historical Society had re-published two pamphlets by Rufus Porter, which he originally published in 1849 and 1850.  I was intrigued to learn something about this man and his ideas.

People have yearned to fly for as long as they have watched the birds soaring in the breezes.  Leonardo da Vinci drew up a number of complex flying machine designs, although none of his concepts were ever built in his lifetime.  Recently (2005), a hang-glider he designed was constructed to his original specifications and it actually worked - although it was not very stable compared to modern designs.

Long before winged aircraft, balloons were the first vehicles used for manned flight.   In 1783, the Montgolfier Brothers developed hot-air balloons that were used for the first tethered and free-floating flights with people on board.  Almost immediately, there was a competing technology:  hydrogen-filled balloons.  The first successful human flight in a hydrogen balloon took place in December of 1783, only a couple of months after the Montgolfiers' flights.

The Tin Goose

I was talking to a man today who commented that he was almost born on a Ford Trimotor airplane on a flight from Rattlesnake Island in Lake Erie. Rattlesnake Island is a private island which is the home of the exclusive Rattlesnake Island Club. The man volunteered that he was 48 years old. I looked up Rattlesnake Island and apparently it is still being served by this same airplane today. I don't know why I was so surprised. Maybe the Ford Trimotor seems like something you would see in the Smithsonian (which you can) or in an old Humphrey Bogart movie. But for the plane to still be flying a regular run is remarkable.

[Image from Wikipedia]

The Ford Trimotor (affectionately nicknamed the Tin Goose) came out of an early interest by Henry and Edsel Ford in the newly emerging field of aviation. An engineer named William Stout trying to start an airplane company sent letters to leading industrialists asking for $1000. The letter stated, "For your one thousand dollars you will get one definite promise: You will never get your money back." Henry and Edsel and 18 other investors put up the money to get Stout started.

By 1925, Henry Ford wanted control of the company and bought it from Stout. The company continued to operate until June of 1933 when Ford's interest in aviation waned in the face of the much more successful aircraft being designed by Douglas Aircraft Company. But in the eight years it was in operation, the Ford aircraft operation produced about 200 Trimotors. Many of these aircraft had long and productive careers.

The one in the Smithsonian, for example, started with American Airlines and was then sold many times over the years for use in hauling cargo and even crop dusting. It ended up being converted into a dilapidated 'house' outside of Mexico City, complete with a stove pipe through the roof of the fuselage. American Airlines repurchased the plane and restored it to its original condition, using it for public relations flights. It even made the first commercial flight out of the newly-opened Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C. in November, 1962. American Airlines donated the plane to the Smithsonian when it was no longer used for public relations and it now hangs in the Air Transportation gallery.

I don't often hear someone casually mention that they had flown multiple times on a Ford Trimotor. It's like hearing someone say they drive a Stanley Steamer. The point here is that technologies don't disappear overnight. As long as they perform a useful function in a serviceable and cost-effective manner, even old technologies can still be found side-by-side with the latest New-New Thing. The Ford Trimotor flies at a cruising speed of 90 knots and lands on a dime, perfect for Rattlesnake Island. You have to admire the Tin Goose for doing the job so well for so long. Here's to another 75 years of service!