Leaping from Skills to Knowledge: Missy Cummings at TEDMED

Missy Cummings

?I loved landing on aircraft carriers, but as much as I loved that, it was very difficult,? says Missy Cummings, aero/astro associate professor and head of the Humans and Automation Lab. ?I was one of the first female fighter pilots and there was a lot of social upheaval when I was inserted into that situation.?

The response from one fellow pilot, who questioned what his role was in this new era, made her ponder the role of pilots in general especially when computers began landing aircraft more precisely than humans. Are pilots necessary when automatic landing always does a better job than a pilot, she asks. Given that, Cummings decided to leave the cockpit and go into research.

Cummings? talk at TEDMED pointed to the impact of technology on the skills-rules-knowledge-expertise model.

In her recent talk at TEDMED, short presentations on improving health and medicine, Cummings described her research on human supervisory control. She pointed to the human-guided micro-aerial vehicles that she studies as well as other new guided technologies such as high-speed rail, the Google car, and, most pertinent to this audience, daVinci robotic surgery.

?My message to you today is that automated computer software, technology?it?s really not about replacement, especially for these complex systems,? she says. ?It?s about re-defining the role.? She used a skills-rules-knowledge-expertise model to point out that some repetitive skills, for example, can be automated by technology?but reasoning cannot. Nothing so far can replace the human ability to respond to uncertainty.

The trick now, she says, is to figure out how technology can support higher level knowledge and expertise in a symbiotic relationship. And the answer is not obvious. ?More information does not make people smarter,? Cummings says.

Watch the TEDMED talk and learn more about her work in the Humans and Automation Lab. For a bit of fun, watch Cummings on the Colbert Report.

Tagged as: computers, Engineering

Source: http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2012/12/19/missy-cummings-at-tedmed/

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