And I recall the guy from IBM who suggested that there might be a need for two, maybe three computers worldwide.
Nothing that is mentioned in the comments is insurmountable.
Progress is coming. People on board ships are a huge expense and a huge liability. Consider the costs associated with housing and maintaining crew. If you can recover the space, and eliminate the expense it is possible to overcome ALL of the concerns.
I bet you will see shipping go from outside of Port A to Port B, with crew coming on to bring the ships into the docks.
Repairs and what not can be centralized en route to service multiple ships.
Insurance rates would drop to cover just the ship and the freight. No more workers comp, no more liability insurance.
Does anyone reading this article think the folks working this plan have not already done the work on these issues?
Change is exciting. Unless you are a maritime engineer.
Work done with what motivation?
Ford executives and engineers did work on fixing the Pinto explosion vulnerability, and decided the cost of paying for lawsuits by people burned to death was cheaper than fixing the bolt position that killed them.
So what's the motivation for gutting the merchant marine industry? You really think it's benign? I don't. Not to mention scale. Problems where humans are available enables stopping any issue from scaling up. Problems with no humans will obviously have serious and potentially unstoppable scaling issues - up to and including an LNG ship off course and headed for a huge city harbor, while being controlled by a hacker, terrorist organization or belligerant country.
Now ask yourself, do you think the only people working such problems were immoral Ford executives who are now retired? Or are there bean counters calculating profit percentages based on allowing a limited number of LNG explosions and resulting burnings of entire cities and the deaths of thousands of people? Take one guess.
And that's only one scenario. Ever look at the SIZE of a tanker ship?
Drug smugglers are already using unmanned ships that are mostly submerged.
With all the regulations, legal use is a latecomer.
An intermediate step would be to have a one person crew of captain/engineer, “just in case” There are plenty of people who would take the job.