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Article, Ghost Ships
https://logicmag.io/pivot/ghost-ships/
Squinting against the sun, I tried to imagine the ships another way: as numbers on a screen, cells in a spreadsheet, dots on a grid. I’d been reading about the information transfer that accompanies the movement of these vessels, and I knew that the scale of this data is nearly as impressive as the ships’ sheer size. Ships like those docked at Long Beach are vital links in the global supply chain, but they’re also floating “data terminals,” as the global maritime industry consultancy Lloyd’s Register put it in 2015. Increasingly, these vessels receive and transmit an enormous amount of information: about their position, of course, but also about weather, traffic, temperature, maintenance, staffing, ocean conditions, and much more. The streams of information are so complex that they threaten to exceed humans’ ability to interpret them. That’s partly why many newer vessels—“smart ships,” in industry parlance—use complex algorithms (some of them devised by Google and Microsoft) to chart their courses. Within the next decade, carriers hope to launch fleets of automated or remote-controlled vessels—“ghost ships,” as they’re sometimes called.