Driverless cars, pilotless planes and now autonomous ships. The future is becoming reality and this has a lot of benefits but is not without challenges either.
There are a lot of benefits when looking at autonomous ships. First of all, it would lower fuel usage and lower labor costs. 90% of the world trade is transported by sea, when reducing these costs the price of many products would probably decline as well. Without rooms for the crew, more cargo could be loaded onto each ship. Another advantage is regarding to safety. The artificial intelligence that would steer the ship would be safer than a human crew. A report by Allianz in 2012 said that 75%-96% of all the casualties at sea were due to human error. If autonomous ships are a lot safer, less of these incidents would happen, less people would die and a lot of the accidents where oil is spilled into the sea would not occur.
The main challenge for shipbuilders is the fact that modern pirates exist, namely hackers. When an autonomous ship full of cargo would get hacked, horrible stuff could happen. First of all, the shipping company could get blackmailed and enormous amounts of money would have to get paid. Another downside would be the terrorists. Just imagine if hackers would hack several ships and just steer them into all the major global harbors. This would destroy the world economy as we know it today. In my opinion, it really depends on how well these ships can defend themselves against a cyberattack in order to decide whether these ships should make it to the sea. An emergency switch should be implemented where they could always get control of the ship again and it will probably take decades of using ethic hackers and taking all the security measures before these ships are allowed on the sea. The benefits do not outweigh the risks, what do you think?
https://qz.com/1050012/no-ladders-and-curved-edges-how-ships-of-the-future-will-fend-off-pirates/
https://www.agcs.allianz.com/news-and-insights/expert-risk-articles/human-error-shipping-safety.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325195302_Cyber-Risk_Assessment_for_Autonomous_Ships
I very much agree on this very intriguing subject, that hackers could be a big hazard when all shipping traffic will be made autonomous. There are a lot of examples in today’s world that have the same threat.
Take blockchain for instance. Blockchain is a very innovative idea that lets the consumer send back their energy surplus. This is can reduce the energy bill significantly. But the way this works, is all via the internet. This makes energy a very big target for hackers, since it’s valuable and possibly easy to hack.
On the other hand, a lot of things have gone digital without any big problems, such as the banking world. In general, bank accounts don’t get easily hacked, if the owner of the account does not get involved (i.e. phishing, robbery, virusses). So it must be possible to code the autonomous ships without hackers being an enormous threat.
It’s indeed a very interesting topic explored in your post, however I believe that there are certain intricacies missing in considering the gradual implementation of automation within the worldwide transport industry (or shipping industry more specifically). Two aspects here are notably catching my attention, namely the sophistication and motives of threat actors that may be interested in targeting shipping vessels with cyber-attacks, and the continuation of conventional piracy. For one it seems unlikely that pirates acting out of motives of poverty and desperation may develop the resources and skills required to launch such cyber-attacks, which are certainly more sophisticated than the what average skiddie’s (aka script kiddies) skill sets allow for. In fact, if pirates, such as those acting from the Somalian coast had those skills, would they still have an interest of going after shipping vessels in the first place? Perhaps they would be more inclined to operate against the financial services industry and launch cyberattacks to deviate large financial sums directly, instead of having to hijack boats and ask for ransom (as in their current operating model).
Moreover, a slightly more likely scenario in which such pirates do not acquire sophisticated cyber-offensive skills, but the shipping industry is launching more and more unmanned, automated vessels on trading missions has its own security benefits as well. For example, Somali pirates may be successfully hijacking an unmanned trading vessel. In this scenario it would be more difficult for them to demand a ransom in comparison to a hostage situation, as they would not have any hostages to bargain with. Also, the hijacked trading vessel’s mother company could remotely steer the ship to a military coalition vessel, which could reduce the critical time to interception needed for adequately trained and equipped personnel to remove the pirates.
Considering the above, I believe that in the context of piracy, automation of the shipping industry has numerous benefits, including from a security perspective. Nevertheless, it is true that though increasing digitisation of manual processes that can be controlled remotely, the attack surface exploitable by sophisticated cyber threat actors increases. While pirates are unlikely to have the sophistication required to target automated vessels, other, equally motivated actors, such as nation-states could very well engage in such cyber-attacks as part of a broader hybrid warfare strategy. Thus it is crucial to implement such automation technologies at a controlled paced, with a deep understanding of security implications, and to not rush such technologies to the market before they can be proven secure enough that their advantages do indeed outweigh their risks.