Why we need R2-D2 if we want autonomous ships, factories, and more

We’re going to need R2-D2.
That’s what popped into my head when I heard the news earlier this week that an autonomous ship trying to make a first-of-its-kind crossing of the Atlantic Ocean had suffered a fault in a simple electrical switch that forced it to detour to the Azores for repairs. An earlier Atlantic crossing attempt by the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, named after the vessel that carried the Pilgrims to America in 1620, had to be aborted last year after an exhaust pipe broke.
The problems that have befallen the Mayflower, a project of a maritime non-profit organization called ProMare with technological support from IBM, are telling: So far, the ship’s sophisticated A.I. software, which it uses to autonomously navigate the ocean, has held up just fine. It is the physical stuff that has broken. But with no human onboard, these mechanical and electrical issues have been enough to keep the Mayflower from achieving its goal.
These challenges ought to be ringing alarm bells for the global maritime industry, which has been investing to try to make autonomous ships a reality as well as for the U.S. Navy which has said it plans to field a range of uncrewed vessels to complement its existing fleet. A few autonomous ships are already operating relatively close to shore, including an autonomous passenger ferry has been trialed in Finland, and a small autonomous cargo ship in Norway. Earlier this week an autonomous ship in Japan made a 500-mile journey, piloted only by A.I., in what may have been the first successful commercial test of such a system. In 2020, the U.S. Navy also said it sent an autonomous cargo vessel 4,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, through the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific Coast to California, with 98% of the journey controlled only by A.I. software. The commercial appeal of such vessels is clear: crew costs account for about 40% to 45% of daily operating expenses for most ocean-going freight vessels, according to the 2021 data from Moore, a global accounting and consulting firm that tracks industry costs. And human error is believed to be responsible for up to 95% of marine accidents, according to industry figures. So shipping companies have good reasons to want to automate their vessels.
But the vision of A.I.-captained vessels plying the seas, with humans only monitoring them remotely, may ultimately founder for this simple reason: “Boats always break,” Brett Phaneuf, co-founder of ProMare and managing director of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project, told me back in November, reflecting on his autonomous vessel’s first aborted journey. And if they break and there’s no one onboard to fix them while underway, the ship may be rendered literally dead in the water, perhaps thousands of miles from the nearest land. At the very least, it will have to make a time-consuming detour to a port, even for a repair that in the past could have easily been completed by an onboard engineer or sailor. The U.S. Navy has already experienced a form of this problem. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that “the Navy’s attempts to reduce crew sizes on crewed ships through increased automation, called optimal manning, resulted in large increases to maintenance costs when the automated systems failed to work as intended, ultimately leading the Navy to assigning additional crew to its ships.”
So autonomous ships might not really happen until we have some kind of general “mechanic” robot like, well, R2-D2. In Star Wars, R2 is an “astromech droid” whose job was to help repair a Starfighter or larger starship if it is damaged in the field. The droid could deploy a wide range of different mechanical tools—a bit like a Swiss Army knife on rollers—as well as a laser for welding. It also had the ability to serve as a backup navigational system in case a starship’s main computer is damaged.
Until we have something like R2-D2 it seems to me that the future of autonomous seafaring is far more limited than the marketing departments at companies like Rolls Royce, BAE Systems, and Wartsila, all of which are working to build the technology for autonomous ships, would have us believe. And while there have been some attempts to create robots that can inspect and make simple repairs to aircraft or fix pot holes, we are still a long way off from Star Wars’ multi-tasking droids. Sailors, who have been at the heart of global commerce for thousands of years, probably have job security for quite a while more.
The same lesson applies to other highly-automated things we want to build using A.I. software, such as “dark customer fulfillment centers,” warehouses without any human employees, where A.I. software and logistics robots are used to pick and pack customer orders in industries ranging from e-commerce to groceries. To a cost-conscious CFO or an efficiency-obsessed chief logistics officer, these things sound great. But what happens if one of the key conveyor belts breaks? Or if there is a fire? (The highly-automated warehouses run by the British online grocer and tech provider Ocado have suffered a number of significant fires in recent years, with some fire safety experts saying that their design complicates efforts to extinguish the blazes.)

Logistics robots can’t carry out repairs or act as robotic fire fighters. Maintenance, fixing stuff, and dealing with emergencies, are still areas where we need to rely primarily on skilled humans. The way we build our automated systems should take that into account. Software may well be eating the world, but there are some things in the physical world that aren’t so easy to ingest.

Jeremy Kahn
@jeremyakahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com