UK air traffic chaos raises alarm bells about rogue AI threat
· Citizen
It will probably go down as one of the biggest civilian air transport disruptions not caused by weather or conflicts – and that’s what makes this week’s cancellation of more than 1 300 flights to and from UK airports so disturbing.
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It wasn’t an outside force, it was a ghost somewhere in the machine – a lurking malady in the massive interconnected air traffic control system – which rendered fancy technology useless, meaning controllers had to revert to old, manual methods.
That meant controllers could only handle a fraction of the flights incoming and outgoing.
Although the head of Britain’s National Air Traffic Services said he did not believe the outage was the result of a deliberate “cyberattack”, experts said it was worrying that a fault in one part of the system had brought down the rest of it.
Why, as is standard practice everywhere else in the aviation sector, was there no “redundancy” or emergency back-up built into this system?
That’s something that airlines, passengers and the UK government will want to know.
But the implications go much further, especially in the age of exponentially advancing artificial intelligence.
How protected are vitally important networks like this from a digital bot going rogue and pulling the plug?