OT - An Autonomous Ship Used AI to Cross the Atlantic Without a Human Crew
Some Friday Fun for your enjoyment...
A little more than 400 years ago, the Mayflower set sail bound for America with 102 passengers on board. Earlier this month, another Mayflower crossed the Atlantic, but this time there were no passengers!
That’s because the ship was navigated by an on-board AI. Like a self-driving car, the ship was tricked out with multiple cameras (6 of them) and sensors (45 of them) to feed the AI information about its surroundings and help it make wise navigation decisions, such as re-routing around spots with bad weather. There’s also onboard radar and GPS, as well as altitude and water-depth detectors.
AI AI Captain!!
Here’s a pic that shows the relative size of the ship:
Very cool. Looks like the boat is solar powered too. Can it pick up Youssef Khayat and bring him back for an official visit?
Actually, Skynet is an EHR called Epic.
110 years (give or take) too late for the souls on the Titanic.
great. robots taking our jobs
I have come to believe that machines actually may be the next evolutionary step. It is commonly thought that human beings are going to occupy the earth forever in some form. I actually kind of think we are on the way out. Yesterdays news.
I've had similar thoughts. We are meat people who will never be able to traverse vast reaches of space, but we can build an AI that will eventually be free to explore the universe.
My thought is that in about 100 years, we’ll be able to figure out how to upload our consciousness to another vessel (presumably mechanical/electrical) when we are about to die, to in essence, live forever.
or we turn into the Matrix.
It has occurred to me that the Matrix may have actually been a true story, or at least based on true events.
Matrix = Metaverse!!! Just say no before Mark Z enslaves us all!!!
Read Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" written in 2000. He predicts we'll be uploading our consciousnesses into machines by [?2075?] or so. Basically when I'm old enough that I'll either be dead or the technology will still be experimental.
We already can upload our conscious to storage it's just that the average human brain was several 100 petabytes of storage (or something crazy like that) and so mostly impractical to today's storage standards. But as I say that I'm writing it from a machine that has 30 terabytes of storage locally, and 20 years ago 1 terabyte was a dream so it's not far off on the storage requirements.
The real question is what do we do with it after?
I like the idea of creating conscious backups of ourselves, and cloning new bodies as we need them. But if we have the ability to do such a thing, why wouldn't we at least enhance our skin and bone and other organs with some sort of artificial material that at least makes us bullet proof, or fire resistant, or impact resistant, or unable to drown, etc... in which case are we still human?
Or this:
Countries with high automation like South Korea and Germany actually have pretty low unemployment rates.
Honestly, this sounds like something that could have been accomplished decades ago, I must be missing something...
A decade ago we had teenage girls sailing solo around the world, so maybe IBM didn't want to steal their thunder.
Large craft (tankers, freighters, etc.) can essentially run on AI these days anyway. Still neat though.
A friend of a friend provides IT support for automated harvesters in Iowa that are essentially navigated by AI through real-time GPS. Crazy what's not directly controlled by people these days.
That was one of my main takeaways after watching Superman III when I was a kid.
Unfortunately it was sunk after docking when an autonomous car drove off the dock following it's GPS.
If A/I can pilot a ship across the Atlantic Ocean, it can certainly do a much better job calling balls and strikes than Angel Hernandez!
#EndTheUmpShow
He should be sent to the minor leagues to improve his game. He’s horrible at his job.
Upvote partly for this umpirical comment but mostly for your original post's "AI AI Captain"! Brilliant.
Yeah, that got me hard too. Who needs porn, just read Mgoblog.
I think its time. I'm a Mets fan and I watch most of their games and the inconsistency game to game, inning to inning, pitch to pitch, is just exhausting. Keep the ump for overall game flow/play and for things on the infield/at home, but enough with the ridiculous calls.
OR, do what tennis did and allow challenges from the teams. that should be an instant read. 3 per team and you keep what you win. It should not change the gameflow at all.
While we're talking about instant replay - baseball's instance is a clownshow. One team can challenge and lose early and therefore be out of challenges, but if the umps deem it "close enough" then they can initiate themselves? wtf. give each team 2 challenges, and again, get it right, you keep it. dont, then done.
I was watching MLB Tonight last and there was a challenge/review. Harold Reynolds made a comment that the umps really like the review process - just so the plays are called correctly.
Agree that they should have more than one challenge per game... and keep them if you're correct. Having two is good because how many times has a manager passed on a challenge thinking he may need it later in the game.
Let’s be honest. Stevie Wonder would give Angel Hernandez a run for his money.
This question may be out of left field. And it's for you and any other mgoblogers. But do you believe that there are actual living people who qualify as "cyborgs"? One of the definitions I found on Collins English Dictionary online was "a person whose physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon mechanical electronic device." I just wanted to ask.
That is very cool. To what extent do planes already do this? From what I understand the planes basically fly the path, is there any AI component to it? Or is it just programmed to get from A to B?
In case you want a glimpse of the future - passenger boats making that voyage will hit a storm, the boat assesses that a lighter weight will help it evade possible damage, and it ejects 20 people from their beds into the sea. Samuel L. Jackson will play the honeymooning leader of the pack to get control back from that mother*ucking boat!
AI is a term without any real definition and changes as our technological capabilities change similar to how "high-speed internet" or "high definition" changes. The best test we have for whether something is "intelligent" is whether it can trick a human into thinking it is intelligent. So, there are probably some aspects in software on planes that could be considered AI, but almost assuredly aren't the most cutting edge AI techniques.
Part of the problem is that air traffic is highly-regulated and any time that AI would be working in a highly-regulated industry, the developer would have to prove that the AI isn't likely to violate regulations. As AI becomes more and more complicated, its decision-making process becomes less and less understandable to a human to the point where it operates largely as a black box. The only way to prove that the black box does what we want it to do without violating regulations is to run enough tests that the regulatory administration is satisfied with the results. That's why there is so much testing going on with automated vehicles right now and why this is such a big deal.
Tricking some humans is pretty easy. I try to explain that a VB macro in excel is not AI, but a large population of my office is sure that it’s witchcraft. For the most part, today’s “AI” is just a series of very advanced algorithms. The computers are not thinking!
what's the size threshold to be considered a "ship"?
"It set sail from Plymouth, England on April 29 and was meant to take three weeks to arrive in Washington, DC—but a mechanical issue ended up derailing it to the Canadian port of Halifax. Details weren’t specified, but it may have been something similar to what happened during the ship’s first attempted voyage in 2021, when a metal component on the backup generator fractured, and solar power alone wasn’t enough for the ship to complete its journey."
There have been other, smaller robotics that have crossed oceans unmanned. What made this attempt different is that instead of just having a programmed mission and collision avoidance routines, it was programmed to learn. Autonomous != intelligent.
Unfortunately, it broke down. Unless there are redundant systems, humans are needed for preventative and occasional maintenance. The way around this is to make things smaller and cheap enough they are disposable. Large vessels will always have some people - but perhaps AI can replace the number of watchkeeping officers and some crew.
10% of the US workforce is in trucking. Tesla is already building driverless trucks. Those jobs are going bye bye.
Those jobs are going away, but Tesla hasn't actually started selling those Tesla semis yet (see here for example). Sure, you can make a deposit but you won't get a truck until 2023 at the earliest.
I'm still fairly skeptical about Tesla's ability to deliver autonomous driving; they do pretty well on the highway but not so well off of it. Which is about to expected--driving is a hard problem to solve.
Having said that, companies could go driverless between hubs just off the highway and use drivers for non-highway driving close to the destination. That would eliminate a lot of drivers, if not all of them.
Based on my limited research on this topic, the autonomous trucking thing is a long way off from being viable. First, they currently can’t handle city driving safely. Secondly, they are still being manned “just in case” on open road routes.
Absolutely; Musk in particular has been overselling Tesla's autonomous driving capabilities for years. Look at the link in the article posted by WestQuad, which dates back to 2018.
Still, this is why I think companies will start out using them between points along the highway and have human drivers do all the off-highway driving. That way you have driverless trucks only doing what they do reasonably well.
Having said that, there's overhead with that, although it could be as simple as a big parking lot in a rural area where drivers wait for the autonomous semis to come in. They'd need hubs like this placed at the end of each route to cover, which either gets expensive (lots of routes) or requires more human drivers (fewer routes). Still, for specific routes this could make sense. (Whether it makes more sense than rail I have no idea, though.)
At this point, though, I personally think the best case for autonomous driving is saving your ass if you fall asleep at the wheel. I personally wouldn't buy a Tesla, either; too many potential issues with build quality, stupid design decisions (touch-based controls, the door handles) and wait times to get repairs done.
I thought we were an autonomous collective.
I saw Brooklyn Pizzas new autonomous delivery vehicle in Birmingham today doing test runs around my neighborhood. Pretty cool!
Execute Order 66