By sister and her husband have a 115’ yacht that they used to keep moored in Seattle and Alaska. On one trip in Alaska I was talking to the captain of the boat about the automated guidance system and its connectivity to GPS and waterway mapping. The cool thing about the coast north of Seattle is that you can travel quite far north without ever hitting the open sea.
Anyway, he showed me how it worked and when I got a good idea of what it could do, I asked him if they could set a course from their location up north of Juneau to take them to Eliott bay (Seattle) and everyone could leave the boat and it would just show up there. He said that it absolutely would.
However, it would not sense other boats in its way or big floating logs, etc.
This was six years ago. Tech only gets better with time.
That’s pretty cool!
10 years from now a good portion of it will be automated.