The GE Brief – November 29, 2018

A GE icon retired to Arizona recently, but its new home isn’t a poolside condo — it’s the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson. Celebrating 49 years of service altogether, the retiree is a modified Boeing 747-100 that for the last couple decades was an important member of the GE family, serving as an airborne lab in which engineers tested successive generations of jet engines. The flying testbed “is my absolute favorite to fly, even more than other 747s,” said Gary Possert, a longtime GE test pilot who guided the plane on its final final approach toward a Tucson-area Air Force base.

And boy, are its wings tired: As the first GE jet engine testbed, the 747-100 was a crucial part of the process that vetted and certified 11 engine models and 39 different engine builds, including the GE90 — the world’s most powerful jet engine — and the GEnx engines for the Dreamliner and the latest 747. “We found the airplane was very adaptable to any engine that we came up with at GE, big and small,” Possert said. It’s the largest GE donation to the Pima museum, where it joins other aviation luminaries — many powered by GE engines.

Read more about the flying testbed’s journey here.

When she was just 24 weeks pregnant, Niamh Graham felt a strange sensation in her stomach, and started bleeding. She rushed to Mediclinic Welcare Hospital in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where she learned that the strange feeling had been contractions — and that she needed to give birth immediately. Graham’s daughter, Grace, came into the world weighing only 1.5 pounds. “They brought her up to my face, and I thought I was saying goodbye,” she recalled.

Saving Grace: Doctors quickly placed Grace in an incubator specially designed to promote the growth and stability of fragile newborns. The machine, called the Giraffe Incubator Carestation and developed by engineers at GE Healthcare, would be Grace’s home for about three months — and served as the lifeline between her premature birth and what became a flourishing childhood. After those three months, Graham was able to hold Grace for the first time; in another three months, the family could go home. Now 9 years old, Grace is the top reader in her second-grade class. Every year on her birthday, Grace and her parents visit Mediclinic Welcare Hospital to say hello to their old friends there — and thanks.

Follow Grace’s journey from a premature baby to a major Harry Potter fan here.

A lot of dire predictions foresee robots, whose capabilities grow every day, replacing humans in all sorts of workplaces, from offices — they’re famously good number-crunchers — to assembly lines, where they’re literally tireless (as long as you keep their joints greased and their algorithms fresh). But experts peering through rosier-colored glasses have sketched a different future, where robots work alongside humans in a productive, even complementary way. In human-robot relations as in high school athletics, it’s all about teamwork.

What’s up, bot? In a new article, applied cognitive scientist Nancy Cooke lists five concepts that should underpin the coming alliance of humans and robots, including mutual backup, mutual trust and common understanding. How’s that play out in real life? Take a robot-aided surgical team, Cooke writes. Having a bot in the OR doing work that’s laborious or tedious — lifting heavy objects, analyzing data — can free up human doctors and nurses for more complex and creative problem-solving tasks. By the same token, though, “planning for this sort of division of labor suggests people shouldn’t replicate themselves in machines,” Cooke warns. “In fact, humanoid-shaped robots or robots and AI that mimic human social behavior may mislead their human teammates into having unrealistic expectations of what they can do.”

Learn more about the ins and outs of human-robot relations here.