On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration begins activating a nearly billion-dollar artificial intelligence system to serve as the primary decision-making engine of air traffic control towers, starting with facilities in the Washington area. It is the most sweeping automation initiative in the agency's history — a moment when the long-negotiated boundary between human judgment and machine intelligence shifts, visibly and consequentially, in one of the few domains where that boundary has always felt sacred. The technology promises efficiency and safety gains, but it arrives carrying the we