My comment: As a former USCG member and current IEEE member who served on Nantucket, I think it's completely appalling idea. One of the former duties the USCG performed was Lightship duty. This is where a group of guys inhabit and maintain a small ship anchored in a shipping lane to mark the center of the channel. There is of course a giant rotating light on the highest mast, simply seeing that the lightship is in front of you is not a problem if anybody is awake.
The above lightship is the USCG Lightship Nantucket, now a floating luxury hotel in NYC. They finally built a station-keeping buoy that could handle the most dangerous channel, which is the approach to the port of Boston in treacherous Nantucket Sound. The above vessel is atypically large for a US Lightship, she was a gift from the UK after this happened:
The class of vessel sunk by the HMS Olympic was the smaller second-to-last class of lightship built by the USA:
Lightship duty is a thing of the past, but merchant ships on autopilot with everybody in their too-small crew asleep are all too common.
The idea of oceans of autonomous tankers/container ships/etc., mowing down anything in their path because somebody on a pleasure craft or wooden fishing boat forgot to rig a radar beacon, or simply dropped it overboard, I find appalling. Yes, I know that commercial sailors are now an obsolete vocation, soon to disappear along with the remaining manned vessels. Still, I regard this as a bad idea.
Automated bulk grain freighter or possibly coal/ore carrier approaches an automated container ship.
Automated tanker ship.
Already Existing Autonomous Ferry, Battery Powered and going into service in Norway.
The insurance companies are all over this idea, as their statistics show that 75% to 96% of marine accidents are caused by human error.
More humans are going obsolete, is the bottom line.
