Who’s afraid of disruptive change?
Guest contributor Kevin Tester of Marine IT and Electronics has kindly shared this post written to cover the recent Gordon Hodge Memorial Lecture given by Nick Lambert of the UKHO.
Lambert makes some interesting points – some indeed already covered by yours truly on the Admiralty blog over the last couple of years – that shipping ultimately won’t avoid the wave of technology coming down the pipe.
The best example of this is ECDIS where the UKHO has tried to increase recognition of the challenges not just of getting to grips with electronic navigation but of the larger forces in play, some of which he references here.
The last point about GPS is also timely, not least because eLoran is finally in operation but because the issues of jamming and spoofing seem as relevant as ever however long they seem to have been reported.
There’s a link to the video here, too. You can follow Kevin at @MITEeditor.
Embrace disruptive change – Gordon Hodge Memorial Lecture
By Kevin Tester
‘Radical new technologies are approaching the maritime industry on a steady bearing and it is time to respond.’ This was the key message former National Hydrographer of the UK, Rear Admiral Nick Lambert sought to deliver as he addressed an audience of marine engineers of all ages, which had descended on Trinity House, London for the IMarEST Gordon Hodge Memorial lecture on 22 May 2013.
The maritime sector is undergoing a seismic shift, he announced. After decades of being left on the periphery, there is a new found recognition of the so-called ‘Blue Economy’. Getting the most from this new economy will require a host of new ‘Blue Technologies’, some of which already exist, but many others are still in their infancy.
Despite this new wave of optimism, the maritime industry is often accused of being inherently conservative. It is criticised for being slow-moving, slow-thinking and generally wary of change however understandable that may be. Depending on who you ask, it is 10, 20 or even 30 years behind the likes of the aviation or automotive industries. To prosper and succeed, the inertia and aversion to change that are these apparent hallmarks of shipping must be addressed. Moreover, embracing change will not only allow the industry to ride the wave, but also help shape it and take charge where it matters most.
So what changes are we talking about? The shift to electronic navigation is perhaps the most apparent and, because it is already underway, perhaps the most instructive of the challenges that lie ahead. But there are others: remote and autonomous control and 3D printing have been bubbling under the surface for a number of years now and have recently entered the wider public consciousness.
Glimpsing the future
Today remote controlled drones are routinely deployed in Afghanistan and theatres of war elsewhere in the Middle East. Autonomous drones – normally taking the form of lightweight quadcopters – are becoming ever more sophisticated and intelligent, escaping the confines of lab environments and increasingly capable of exploring the real-world. Earlier this month BAe demonstrated a remotely controlled commercial equivalent plane in controlled airspace: arguably, a natural progression from the fly-by-wire control systems that are de rigeur in commercial aviation. Google has been experimenting and is making rapid progress with driverless cars. These advances are gradually seeping into maritime space. And at IMDEX Asia earlier this year the Singaporean Navy gave delegates a glimpse of its unmanned surface craft, which is already patrolling waters near the island city state.
So unmanned surface craft are out there patrolling a seaspace. What are the implications? How are they controlled, what is the training and experience for the operators and are such operations effectively administered by the COLREGS? It may be the case that COLREGS are fine for the time being but should we begin the debate about updating them in light of emerging technology?
The rise of 3D printing, at first glance, would appear distant from the maritime industry. However ignoring it completely, warns Lambert, would be a mistake. If the development of this technology continues on its current trajectory, it could bring about a revolution in how and where manufacturing takes place. Why churn out toys from a factory in China when it could be done with a quicker turnaround locally? This would have implications on the pattern of trade that has traditionally provided the backbone of today’s shipping industry.
Staying in charge
But arguably what is more important than the hardware is how we – the users – interact with it. Drawing from his time at UKHO, Lambert flashes up a slide of an ECDIS console adorned with countless Post-It notes for the benefit of its human-users. This, he says, is due to a lack of user-centred design. ‘Whilst a big step forward in capability, the technology is not always doing what the user needs it to do,’ he states.
Drawing on the lessons of ECDIS implementation he suggests that learned bodies, such as IMarEST, are well-positioned to help steer the evolution of new technologies and ensure that the user is in charge of the machine and not vice-versa.
Lambert went on to explore the differences between ‘digital immigrants’, the generation that has adopted the Internet (sometimes reluctantly) as an adult, and ‘digital natives’, referring to those who grew up with the Internet and who can’t imagine a world without it. Notably, whereas ‘immigrants’ were brought up to learn and memorise, ‘natives’ expect to simply ‘look-up’ information as and when required. The two groups differ also in their attitudes to privacy and information sharing.
While neither approach is better or worse than the other, this shift, Lambert argues, impacts on how people interact with technology. ‘The younger generation is more likely to implicitly trust what machines tell them, without necessarily understanding the limitations of that information or the technology producing it. The classic example here is the anecdote of a motorist blindly following his satnav and driving off a quay into a canal. The consequences of a similar error of judgement at the helm of 200,000gt tanker would, unfortunately, be rather less comical.’