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Comment by chriskanan | Hacker News Reader

I spent two years working on autonomous ships at NASA JPL, primary on developing deep learning algorithms for ship detection and classification to obey maritime traffic rules (COLREGS), avoid obstacles, help with decision making, etc.

Regarding piracy, autonomy would cut down on costs a lot. Based on my understanding, besides cutting down on life-support costs and having extra room for more cargo, the ships would also be able to eliminate the cost of the armed guards that many have kept on their ships since the rise of piracy. That's one of the main reasons why we don't hear about piracy anymore [0]. With no controls on the ship, pirates wouldn't be able to take control.

Note also that Rolls Royce is looking into drone ships (rather than full autonomy): https://www.rolls-royce.com/media/press-releases/yr-2016/pr-...

[0] http://www.marineinsight.com/marine-piracy-marine/18-anti-pi...

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What would stop heists on the high seas? For example, I could imagine someone breaking into a container with "valuable" goods (remember a lot of these pirates come from impoverished backgrounds, so being able to flip cargo still net a nice profit).

Possible, but unloading cargo would be more involved. Also, without access to electronic manifests, I am not sure there's any easy way to know what's in a container, not to mention many of them would be stacked in such a way as to inaccessible. All of which is a lot harder than ransoming a crew. I suppose it might be possible for pirates just to threaten to sink the ship.

One would simply disable propulsion and communications, and then haul the ship elsewhere for classification and sale of its cargo.

With no humans on board, then there is no incentive not to use deadly force for disabling critical subsystems.

equivalently, there's no real incentive to not use deadly force to clean the ships of pirates as a deterrence and take the write off on any damages.

I suspect with drone ships and the lack of crew liability, there will arise contract security companies with pre-positioned ex-seal teams in hotspots to deal with piracy.

With access to electronic manifests, you could program the logistical system to deliver the goods to the destination of your choosing. Which might be easier than piracy.

Another thing are systems like the one done by ATG - planning better routes for ships with multi-agent models. For example the paper Vaněk, Ondřej, Ondřej Hrstka, and Michal Pěchouček. "Improving group transit schemes to minimize negative effects of maritime piracy." IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 15.3 (2014): 1101-1112.

> With no controls on the ship, pirates wouldn't be able to take control.

It doesn't matter if there aren't any switches or touch screens. Once someone has access to the engine room and steering gear compartment, all bets are off. They can physically adjust valves to get the ship going where they want it to.

Even if they don't have any tools to gain entrance into the ship, they just have to block the air-intakes and the engines will shut down. If it's battery-powered, they just have to let the ship run over some appropriately-sized lines which will get caught in the propellor and seize the shaft.

Or just get onboard and start smashing stuff until the boat stops. It would be pretty hard to prevent a grapple hook from working (one could imagine automatic water cannons though). Best idea I've got is flexible rods sticking out from the perimeter of the ship to block the hook. The hook gets caught in the rods and when you pull it slides off the end.

It's possible to make doors that are extremely hard to cut through... but they can always just cut through the wall instead.

Drone ships sound interesting. The shipping company can definitely afford having a person remotely check in on millions of dollars of cargo every ~15 minutes or so, and so full autonomy seems like the 20 in 80/20 (maybe more like 95/5).

With no controls on the ship, pirates wouldn't be able to take control.

20 lbs of C4 in the control and /or engine room might just do it. So they don't take control (ship can be $urrendered later in pristine condition), they do worse.

>With no controls on the ship, pirates wouldn't be able to take control.

So they'll just figure out how to disable the ship. And then they have a big drifting fortress to squat on/ransom/move cargo off of.

Taking hostages is the only reason why pirates can (sometimes) ransom the ship instead of getting cleaned off by PMCs or even foreign militaries patrolling the waters.

A ship without hostages means that a pirate has a good chance of not getting home ever again - the patrols aren't allowed (rightly) to stop a "fisherman" boat in these waters before it's done anything, but once they are on board and making a ransom note, they'd be lucky if they survive to be arrested.

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