“AI is a super fascinating field. The whole world is literally open for you to find problems to solve.”

Tony Zhou 
Hello, listeners. Welcome to our final episode of The Longitudes of Imagination series. Throughout the series, we’ve shared conversations with the leadership team of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship 400 project. I am Tony Zhou, a Longitude fellow at Yale University.

Jade McAdams 
And I’m Jade McAdams, a Longitude fellow at Rice University. We hope you’ve enjoyed this series as much as we have. In this episode, Tony and I will discuss a few highlights and topics that stood out to us.

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Tony
We started off with a conversation with Brett Phaenuf, who’s the co-director of the Mayflower 400, such a brilliant guy. We spoke a lot about AI ethics and his vision for the Mayflower 400. I think it is really interesting how his vision goes so much more than what is currently the Mayflower 400, because he hopes one day that this ship will traverse the seas, and if it finds something that it is curious about, it will look at the sample and send it back to scientists who would be on land so that they can explore and do more research on whatever the ship finds.

Jade
Yeah, I think that’s really cool. Because something you just mentioned is like what the ship is curious about. I think that’s a really interesting way to put it, because this whole project was really driven by Brett and Don’s curiosity about researching the ocean. And then they came up with this crazy concept to really take something that didn’t exist and push it to the boundaries and create a full deliverable. And now their goal for the ship is actually to be curious in and of itself. And I think that’s a really interesting way that human creativity is sparking creativity in a machine. And I also think it’s interesting because Brett’s creativity sparked Don’s creativity when it came to this project. There was that quote that Don said, where him and Brett are standing at the edge of a cliff. And Brett asks Don if he wants to jump off and then kind of just shoves Don off with him. And then Don has to create a roadmap from nothing, and really just go from no idea at all to creating a final product. And I think that’s something that engineers are actually really good at. So personally, I thought that was really cool. And I liked how Brett really has a vision for where this is going to go.

Tony
Where do you think Don gets his creativity and imagination?

Jade
I think Don mentioned that he gets a lot of his creativity and imagination from learning from his dad when he was a little kid. His dad was a geologist who used to dive down to the bottom of the sea to collect samples. So Don’s had this fascination with the ocean and ocean engineering. And him and Brett have been working on projects in the ocean engineering field for 30 years. So it’s interesting how people can draw creativity from a lot of different sources.

Tony
When I asked Brett the same thing about who he draws creativity and imagination from, or who his influences are, he also spoke about his parents. The things he actually talked about were how they instilled values of working hard and education. And so to me, when I think about that, I would think of someone who’s very rigorous when it comes to academics. But when you speak with Brett, he’s like, so out there with his ideas. But at the same time I think he thinks very methodically, kind of like how Don as well talked about. They both think in like first principles.

You had mentioned that engineers are really purpose driven, and they’re independent thinkers. And I think that really aligned with also what Don was saying, right? But at the same time, what is it with the stereotype that engineers aren’t really that creative?

Jade
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s an interesting thing, because engineers can be incredibly creative. But it does require them to be motivated and engaged in what they’re working on. For example, I’ve noticed in my own work at school, that a lot of times professors, for example, will give you a problem and an equation tell you to solve it. And while an engineer absolutely can do that, we don’t necessarily want to. We’d rather be given, like Don, this blank piece of paper, and a blank map, and told to figure out how to do it for ourselves. And I think that’s kind of what Carrie is saying has happened on this project. The engineers haven’t been given something specific and said, You have to do it this way. Instead, they’ve been given this really big goal, and told to figure out how to reach it. And I think that’s where engineer creativity really shines. And I think Jonathan actually makes a point to engage people from the very beginning of the story. And that brings in how engineers need to be brought in at the very base levels, because they need to be part of the people coming up with that problem solving process and taking it from point A all the way to point Z. If you just bring people in towards halfway through a project, or you know, when the Mayflower is actually successful, and accomplishing its voyage across the ocean, people aren’t going to be as engaged and motivated.

Tony
Yeah, that’s really interesting that you pointed that out. Alright, so if you had to pick between being that engineering mind, like Don, or that creative visionary, like, Brett, what would you pick?

Jade
I think that where I am right now would probably put me more at the engineering, hands on, creating all the steps, like where Don is, but I think that I’d like to work in my career towards being a more visionary person like Brett. Because I think when you create a vision, you can make so much happen and really expand the future of technology, and really utilize the skill sets of the people around you. If you’re creating a vision, you can bring anyone in and say, Hey, what do you think about this project? And I think that’s really fascinating.

Tony
Jonathan does the opposite, right? Like Jonathan is, he’s the one that injects that storytelling or that narrative into a project. And then when he spoke with Molly, he was like, I wish I learned more about coding. I wish I learned more technical stuff. And if I had to go back, I would probably be studying oceanography right now. So I don’t know, maybe it’s just humans, we think the grass is always greener on the other side.

Jade
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a combination of that. And also the fact that to really be successful at anything, I feel like you need to know about a lot of different things. You can be an expert in one field and know almost everything there is to know in that field. But if you can’t make cross sectional relationships to other fields, or tie it back to why it would matter, then nobody is going to go deep into your research and really dig into that one specific point because they won’t understand it as well as you. So you need to be able to really show why your research matters across a variety of fields, and why what you’re creating is important. And I think that ties in to what a lot of our interviewees spoke about when they talked about being interdisciplinary and having various- I think Brett talks about really loving to read and being an avid reader at one point. And Jonathan talks about how he was a humanities major, and really had this great grasp of history and philosophy, but he wishes he could code. It all ties back to wishing that you can tie your knowledge in to the knowledge of another field.

Tony
Yeah, definitely, I think all of them come from such unique backgrounds. Brett identified as an anthropologist, and yet he’s working on the forefront of AI. Carrie started off in journalism, I believe. You know, she ended up working in corporate and managing people. And even Don, I think he draws from, like, I remember in his interview, he was saying one of his mentors worked on medical imaging, and that’s where he also got a bit of his ideas from, and so everyone draws from places all over, and then they channel that towards their own projects. Would you want to be someone of like, a lot of breadth? And just learn broadly? Or would you want to be that person on a team who knew like one thing, very solid.

Jade
I think that for me, I would want to be someone who has a breadth of knowledge, because I think you can always find an expert in a field but I think it’s sometimes harder to find someone to make connections for you. So I think being able to be the person that makes those connections across the field would be really cool to do. It’s interesting that you bring up how all these people draw from different resources and have different backgrounds. Because if you look at what they all want for the future of this ship, it kind of ties into that. They don’t want this project to be something that’s like a one and done. They don’t want it to be something that only makes an impact in the specific field of fully autonomous ships, going from the UK to the US collecting ocean research. They want this to be something that really has an impact across various fields and paves the way for augmented intelligence in, yes, the ocean industry, but also in other industries, and really just opens people’s eyes to what augmented or artificial—Don  likes to call it augmented so it doesn’t scare people—but what augmented intelligence can really do for the world as a whole. So what are your thoughts on either what you think AI can do in the future, or just what the interviewees think about AI?

Tony
I think the last interview we had, Andy, he spoke a lot about transferable tech, or  transferable skills, how he would want to apply all of the things that are successful for the Mayflower 400 to new projects. Brett also talked about it in his vision for it, and how he would want it to be implemented into cargo ships like that. That’s a huge thing. I remember he mentioned how there’s bias in ocean data because so much of it is unexplored, that the data we do have about the ocean is only the little parts of the sea that we do have data on. So he would want to apply that to all the unknown parts of the ocean.

And where do I think AI is gonna go? I mean, I think AI is eventually just going to be something that is like our cell phones, it’s going to be built or modeled in a way that will help us, that will improve our lives. At the same time, I think there’s also sort of, well, how Brett talked about this like fear towards AI, and I think Don also talked about it, because people don’t really understand exactly what’s going on. So it’s interesting, and as someone who is studying and learning about data science, machine learning, it’s a super fascinating field. And the whole world is literally open for you to find problems to solve. And I think that’s really interesting. And this is just such a good example of use case for AI.

Jade
Yeah, absolutely. AI is, I think, one of the best examples of imagination, creativity and technology, because like you said, it can be used for almost everything, but people are scared of it. And I think one of the things about imagination and creativity and innovation is that the unknown is always going to cause a little bit of fear. And people are always going to be hesitant to trust something that they don’t understand or that they’ve never seen before. But I think what makes the Mayflower project so fascinating, and such a good example of how to get people invested in something completely foreign to them, is that it really has brought people together. And they’ve been able to watch the story from the beginning all the way through. And the team has just been so open, for example, letting us interview them and telling us all their stories and things that they’ve been motivated by or been scared of during the process. They’ve been able to share that with people. And I think that makes the project so much more human, and makes AI so much more human, but not in the way that people are scared of. So I really enjoyed hearing about that on the project. And I think the future of AI is a fascinating realm.

Tony
Definitely.

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Jade
This brings us to the end of our episode in the Longitudes of Imagination series. Tune in next for our series on Space Technology.

Tony
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