At about 2,000 years old, the “Ship of Theseus” puzzle still feels resonant: if every part of a ship is replaced, is it still the same ship? The modern U.S. Navy faces the reverse dilemma—what happens when decades pass and the world has changed, but the ship remains essentially the same?
The U.S. builds “the best warships in the world,” said Rylan Hamilton, CEO and cofounder of autonomous vessel startup Blue Water Autonomy. “They can get hit by a missile, and still operate and survive. But to get there, we’ve built up layers and layers of requirements based on almost 100 years of lessons operating ships at sea. And these layers of requirements make it really difficult to adopt modern technology. If you go on any ship today, some of the equipment looks like it was designed and built over 40 years ago.”
