How much and how far?

WESTJET FLIGHT SIMULATOR

How much and how far? I think its all about it. How much should we rely on technology and automation and how far will it meet our expectations. Should we get into the loop or completely avoid it. Many questions filled my mind as I read Norman's chapter four “Servants of our Machines” The following piece of content grabbed my attention this week.

“In theory, a person could still be in the loop, stay full aware of the situation, even with completely automated equipment, by continually monitoring the vehicles actions and assessing the situation being ready to step in when needed.”

Norman refers it to as “Situational Awareness”. This triggered my memories of the field visit last week to the West Jet flight Simulator. It was a WOW experience. I got into the plane sat besides the captain and had the pleasure of a mesmerizing tour over Calgary. I am sure that a number of principles and theories are deployed in developing a close to reality model/simulation and the one that I associated with the West Jet model was “situational awareness”. Coming back to what Norman says about situational awareness, and what I understand from my learning is that it is about perception, comprehension and prediction. What do you perceive from the environment? How do you comprehend the perceived event? And what and how do you predict and deal with that particular event in future or rather how you interact with such a kind of event in future. The point of concern here is that, Norman talks about the fully automated cars of the future that will provide us the luxury of not holding the steering, twisting and turning but according to the principles of situational awareness we have to be vigilant like pilots are while flying the plane. The plane is fully automated but pilots are constantly monitoring its actions and control it with their eyes pealed. It will be good to have a car like that but I think that the fully automation will have other demands for us it will generate a list of things that we have to watch and monitor in our car so that it give us a safe ride. We will have to be vigilant about each and every move it makes for us and maintain a symbiotic relationship after all it is a matter of our life.
Thanks for reading