"What about the captain? Out at sea a ship can basically go on a kind of autopilot today."
There is for sure a certain feel to boating. Although I have never obviously operated a boat of this size I have owned smaller boats and depending on sea conditions there is judgement in play that can't be offset by technology and especially an actual human with seat of the pants feel and judgement. That said it might be possible if the operator was literally in some kind of simulator and able to sense things in a similar way (although you wouldn't have smell or the feel of the air).
This idea though might cut it's teeth in a smaller area perhaps some kind of shuttle between two close ports as opposed to the open ocean or something like a water conveyor by ship.
> there is judgement in play that can't be offset by technology and especially an actual human with seat of the pants feel and judgement.
I thought the same thing at first, but I then I thought that a) These ships are too big and slow to be agile enough to respond to the kind of seat-of-the-pants type navigation I'm familiar with and, and b) I'm sure people said the same things about driverless cars.
I bet Spitfire era fighter pilots thought the same thing, before the advent to inherently unstable computer controlled fighters. And I suspect a bunch of modern fighter pilots think the same about removing the plot altogether. There's a similar significant benefit there too, remove the meat sack from a fighter jet, and all of a sudden 25g turns become acceptable - there's a lot of limitations on a fighter jet based on the requirement to keep a human being alive while "getting the job done".
Is that really true? This kind of "intuition" kills pilots of aircraft all the time. Part of learning to be a pilot is practicing the suppression of these feelings and trusting the equipment.
There is for sure a certain feel to boating. Although I have never obviously operated a boat of this size I have owned smaller boats and depending on sea conditions there is judgement in play that can't be offset by technology and especially an actual human with seat of the pants feel and judgement. That said it might be possible if the operator was literally in some kind of simulator and able to sense things in a similar way (although you wouldn't have smell or the feel of the air).
This idea though might cut it's teeth in a smaller area perhaps some kind of shuttle between two close ports as opposed to the open ocean or something like a water conveyor by ship.