The Tao Road to Risk Mitigation - In Wichita Kansas?

A 5-hour road trip brought me to a midwestern aviation capital in Wichita, Kansas.  The annual U.S. Flight Test Safety Workshop was again an enlightening and sobering remembrance.  MIT's STPA was again presented as a tutorial,  but his many test programs will incorporate it.  Too few I'm afraid.  Distinguished retired USAF test pilot Rod Huete took us through the painful lessons of the 1990s X-31 mishap.  Painful because the Air Force Test Center had embraced all the CRM practices that should have prevented this accident.  And the X-31 program had assembled a stellar test team.  But again the ego and human frailty yeared up to bite.   

Mike Contratto, Dept. of the Air Force augmented this theme with his thought-provoking presentation, "The Tao, Self Deceptive Rationalization and the Vulcan Mind Meld."  In his talk, Contratto incorporated wisdom from George Chandler's masterpiece, "The Tao of Safety" quoting the compelling truths, such as "the capacity of the human mind for self-deception and self-justification is infinite...  We only really learn lessons when there are emotional consequences...  Even then the lessons are forgotten over time..."  

And then Contratto turned to AI in the form of ChatGPT to highlight the dilemma and path forward. 

These presentations solidified my conviction that humans can't do it alone.  No amount of training or human oversight will ever prevent mishaps when testing complex, non-deterministic systems. This was the genesis of my telling the European SFTE symposium attendees 2 weeks later in Rome that an AI partner may be the missing link to take safety to the next level

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