"The damned things are self-repairing. All I can do is stand by and watch, and fill out a report. Which is a ridiculous position for a man who considers himself an engineer."
"Why don't you turn to some other field?"
"No use. I've checked, and the rest of the engineers are in the same position I'm in, watching automatic processes which they don't understand. Name your field: food processing, automobile manufacture, construction, biochem., it's all the same. Either stand-by engineers or no engineers at all."
"This is true for spaceflight also?"
"Sure. No member of the spacepilot's union has been off Earth for close to fifty years. They wouldn't know how to operate a ship."
"I see. All the ships are set for automatic."
"Exactly. Permanently and irrevocably automatic."
"What would happen if these ships ran into an unprecedented situation?"
"That's hard to say. The ships can't think, you know; they simply follow pre-set programs. If the ships ran into a situation for which they were not programmed, they'd be paralyzed, at least temporarily. I think they have an optimum-choice selector which is supposed to take over unstructured situations; but it's never been tried out. At best, it would react sluggishly. At worst, it wouldn't work at all. And that would be fine by me."
"Do you really mean that?"