Juliette Kayyem, The Atlantic; Of Course Americans Blamed the Ground Stop on AI
"For many hours, the Federal Aviation Administration did not explain why it issued a national ground stop in the United States this afternoon. The agency described the cause only as a “telecommunications outage” and cited “extraordinary circumstances,” but failed to say more. So speculation abounded: Was the problem connected with the onboarding of a new AI route-selection system this week? Is it somehow related to the Microsoft Outlook outage this week? Or is the cause some antiquated telecommunications system that just finally gave up trying?
In the absence of solid information from trusted authorities, people interpret crises through the prism of their preexisting concerns. When the aviation system shut down, many Americans’ minds went to DOGE cuts, cyberattacks by hostile foreign actors, recent reports of renegade AI. A safety planner’s job is to envision the full range of possible threats and assess how likely each one is to occur. Even before recent advances in artificial intelligence, the list of factors that could jeopardize commercial aviation was already long: terrorism, extreme weather, staffing strains, the decay of outdated communications networks, and more. AI could theoretically help the aviation system manage risks and disruptions, but it also adds many more variables that could go wrong."
