RE: AI On The Sea

The crew is usually the weakest point on a ship (particularly on a good sail boat). There are several stories where the crew have abandoned ship and been rescued due to bad weather, with the boat still floating around years later.

Another thing I've though about - there are lots of accidents happening every year due to silly human mistakes. A year ago, a Norwegian frigate with super-expensive radar equipment and navigational systems managed to crash right into a gigantic brightly lit oil tanker, despite being warned over VHF that they were on collision course - it's completely ridiculous. I've also had several accidents when I've been out sailing, i.e. crashing into land while falling asleep or having the attention somewhere else, failing to see that I've asked the autopilot to take the boat directly over a rock ... worst was when I let someone else have the rudder ... there was one rock in the sea, it was clearly marked both on the map and physically. Said person was steering manually and had a lookout both on the sea and on the navigation system and managed to crash straight into this rock. I could go on ... big ships crashing into bridges or going straight on land because the captain was drunk or fell asleep over the rudder ... yes, it happens, far too frequently.

There are of course risks with autonomous systems, all programs are buggy, there can be unexpected problems onboard that needs either human human hands and/or head(s) to be resolved, other floating objects/ships that cannot be properly understood (or maybe not even seen) by the radar ... but still ... I believe a lot of accidents could have been avoided either by autonomous controlling of the ship - but instead of replacing the crew completely, it may be an idea to fix better warning systems.

All modern navigation systems come with alarms, but they usually go off way too often, they are often turned off, and the system usually don't make any difference i.e. between a "warning" and a "critical" alarm ... and often it's possible to go crash into an island or another ship without any alarms going off at all. In the case of the frigate crashing with the tank ship, a simple AIS alarm could have prevented it. However, such alarms were turned off because there were "too many false alarms due to moored or anchored ships". I have the possibility to turn on alarms on waypoint arrival, low depth (under the bow), out of course and objects within a radar guard zone ... but putting on and adjusting all those alarms can be a major hassle, the alarms are rarely useful and too often an annoyance. And the most important alarm: "you're on collision course with a rock or land" - it's simply missing. The navigator knows where I am, and it usually knows about the land and the rocks right in front of the boat , it should be very possible to program it to give a critical loud alarm whenever the ship is in immediate danger of collision, but no ... that's not how it works.