Autonomous Cargo Ships

Autonomous Pirate Ships....

Robot sumo writ large!

Yes, but I would not expect much reaction between an autonomous cargo ship, and a Somalian abacus.

Recent experience here includes a cruise liner that is able to navigate itself to any sea destination on the planet automatically to within 10 metres.

It does seem such a shame that such a system was not used during the last sailing of the Costa Concordia...

I can just imagine someone hacking this and telling it to sail to Enid, Oklahoma.

One day humanity will get wiped out in a nuclear war and the autonomous vehicles will just keep driving around, oblivious.

The same thing will happen to e-mail.

Yeah, let the spambots spam each other all they want! And most of the calls to my answering machine are robocalls. I only get involved if someone I know is calling.

As long as such vehicles could harness solar power, and assuming at least one such vehicle was not (sufficiently incapacitated) by the nuclear blasts and subsequent damage, that could actually happen...

I'm not the least bit surprised by any system converting over to full or near full autonomous operation.

People as a whole have largely priced themselves out of their own jobs at this point.

Too many either don't want to work or if they will only will do it for an unrealistic level of compensation ultimately putting their overall cost per person on any system so high that by their own actions they are forcing automation of every function that can be done by a machine into place.

Seems like a natural fit. Large, lumbering vehicle that can be precision guided with a handful of systems.

However, hauling 100 containers for 65 NM is just a drop in the bucket.

So then 65 NM, represents big semiconductor, the evil genius creating the latest horde of "mini-me"?

The real question with any autonomous vehicle should not be how well does it handle "normal" condition but how well does it handle unpredictable changing conditions?

More than likely they will still take primary direction from some remote monitoring and control center like any military drone does.

If there is a bad storm in their intended path someone takes over and give it a different path to follow.

Or if total control center communication is lost it would likely have a pre programmed alternative action plan its falls back on of some kind.

... and, with an appropriate ''Forbin'', maybe ''Colossus'' will (meet) ''Red Guardian'' after all ?...