On June 1 2009, Air France Flight 447 vanished on a routine transatlantic flight. The circumstances were mysterious until the black box flight recorder was recovered nearly two years later, and the awful truth became apparent: three highly trained pilots had crashed a fully functional aircraft into the ocean, killing all 288 people on board, because they had become confused by what their Airbus 330’s automated systems had been telling them.

I’ve recently found myself returning to the final moments of Flight 447, vividly described by articles in Popular Mechanics and Vanity Fair. I cannot shake the feeling that the accident has something important to teach us about both the risks and the enormous rewards of artificial intelligence.

The latest generative AI can produce poetry and art, while decision-making AI systems have the power to find useful patterns in a confusing mess of data. These new technologies have no obvious precursors, but they do have parallels. Not for nothing is Microsoft’s suite of AI tools now branded “Copilot”. “Autopilot” might be more accurate, but either way, it is an analogy worth examining.