Sailorless Ships Are Coming to the Freight Industry

From FEE.org (July 10):

Tech companies from Google to Apple may be ploughing resources into driverless cars, but on our oceans, automated ships could be making bigger waves by the end of the decade.

Norwegian company Yara will launch the world’s first electric cargo ship next year. Initially manned, the vessel will move to remote control in 2019 before becoming totally autonomous in 2020.

Named Yara Birkeland, the vessel will sail between Yara’s main factory facility in Norway to some of the country’s bigger ports, carrying cargo which is currently transported by road. It’s estimated that the battery-powered ship will remove the need for 40,000 truck journeys a year.

Making "Drone" Ships a Reality

Although advances in driverless cars are getting more media attention, major advances have already been made in bringing artificial intelligence to the shipping and freight industries.

Rolls-Royce is also working on making autonomous ships a reality by the end of the decade, in conjunction with ship builders and researchers in Finland. Meanwhile, research body MUNIN — or Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks — has been partly funded by the European Commission to develop the technology needed to make robotic ships. [read more]

Make sense to me. I mean if society is going to have self-driving cars why not sailorless ships? What will be next self-flying planes? That’s kind of scary. (I don’t mean drones—I mean autonomous flying planes.)