If you’ve ever wondered what flying on Concorde was like, I flew on it once, coming back from New York.

It flew at Mach 2, that’s twice the speed of sound, but it didn’t feel any different.

All I thought was, the windows were too small and there weren’t any movies.

But one thing did impress me, when the pilot told us that we were flying faster than a rifle bullet.

I couldn’t even see a rifle bullet, but I was travelling faster than one. That was an amazing fact. Hard for the human mind to grasp.

Proof of that was that in 1956, test pilot Tom Attridge was flying one of the first supersonic jet fighters, the Grumman F11.

It had four 20mm cannons, and he’d been told to test-fire them at top speed.

They needed to know what would happen when the force of all four guns started pushing back against the plane.

Would Newton’s Third Law (action and reaction are equal and opposite) affect it, what stresses would it put on the airframe?

So over the Atlantic he picked an empty piece of ocean and fired a four second burst. The plane shuddered but seemed okay, so he took it up to the next level.

He turned on the afterburner, which came on like a kick in the pants.

Then he fired another long burst of the cannons, the plane shuddered again but seemed okay.

Then suddenly the windscreen shattered and the engine started breaking up.

He quickly throttled back, turned the plane around and put it into a shallow glide, nursing it back to within sight of his airfield.

He couldn’t make it all the way back so he crash-landed a mile short, shattered a rib and broke three vertebrae.

They investigated his plane and what they found amazed them. His plane had been hit by gunfire. There was a cannon shell in the windshield, one in the nose-cone, and one in the engine intake.

His plane had been shot down at supersonic speed, in the middle of an empty ocean. How was that possible?

Eventually they realised what had happened. Tom Attridge had shot himself down.

It had never previously occurred to anyone that such a thing could happen, because they’d never had planes that flew that fast before.

After the first burst, Tom had turned on the afterburner making the plane go faster.

But the plane’s speed made it overtake the burst that he’d previously fired, so he flew straight into his own 20mm cannon shells.

Once you fire a bullet it starts to slow down. Once you turn on the plane’s afterburner it starts speeding up.

And so the plane had tried to overtake its own bullets. The latest technology had run into old-fashioned reality.

All the pilot was concentrating on was the technology, so he forgot about reality.

This is the mistake we make with AI.

We forget that old-fashioned reality still exists, we expect the technology to do all the thinking for us.

That’s what Steve Jobs meant when he said: “Computers are dumb. But what computers are is really fast.”

Computers can do a lot of the work for us but we have to do the thinking.

Which is why Carl Ally’s strapline for IBM many years ago was:

MACHINES SHOULD WORK, PEOPLE SHOULD THINK.

What separates man from the rest of the animals is the ability to use tools.

Tools help us work much better. But the operative word is ‘help’.

Tools still need someone to use them.

That’s why Steve Jobs referred to computers as: “a bicycle for the mind.”

A bicycle can take us places much faster than we could go on our own.

But a bicycle can’t go anywhere without us.

Someone has to decide where they want to go and then steer it.

That’s the creative part, and machines don’t do the creative part.

The post MACHINES SHOULD WORK, PEOPLE SHOULD THINK first appeared on Dave Trott's Blog.