Tony Zhou
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Hello listeners! I’m Tony Zhou, a Longitude Fellow from Yale University. Today’s episode features part-2 of a conversation I shared with Brett Phaneuf.

Brett is the Co-Director of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship 400 project, and the founder and chief executive of Submergence Group LLC (in the US), and M Subs Ltd (in the UK). In addition, he is 1 of 3 founding board members of ProMare, a non-profit (501c3) organization that advocates for marine exploration around the globe.

In our second episode of this series, Brett and I discuss his vision for the Mayflower 400, his role models, and qualities students should develop as they enter the workforce. We start our conversation with Brett sharing unexpected surprises throughout the project, and his vision for the Mayflower 400.

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Tony
Where do you see this project going in terms of your vision for it, but then at the same time, the part B of that question is, along your journey right now, what’s one thing from this project that your team has accomplished that you didn’t expect to happen?

Brett Phaneuf
Where do I see it going? I’d like it not to break anymore, that will be good. But the ocean will see to it. So I’m not worried about that. It’s definitely going to be broken many, many times. And that’s okay. You know, I like the idea that it doesn’t have a goal. So yeah, we wanted to cross the Atlantic. And we will. But sometimes the goal is just to explore. So it doesn’t have to go some place specifically, maybe it follows a trend in the ocean, and maybe it just goes out and detects something unique, right? I’d like to get to the point in some years where we could deploy an AI on the Mayflower or something like it, where it could detect something unusual. Maybe it’s on a mission to go survey, to do what they call an Atlantic meridional transect. So right down the middle, the Atlantic, north to south. And it finds something unusual, and without needing to be told, maybe in concert with satellite support within distributed space-based AI systems—which is happening, right, with instantaneous access to the global corpus of knowledge about the item—the system itself could decide that that was really unique. Or say, what would my humans really like to know about this, and know that it should, within the context of the boundaries of its mission, make a judgment to deviate, to chase that data. Because it was discovering something new, truly unique. That would be my vision for it. I think it’s gonna take a long time. But I think it’s really an applied research project. And so that’s why we’re doing it the way we’re doing it.

And then what have I discovered within the context of this project, what has been the most unexpected thing?

Tony
Yeah.

Brett
Wow, well, it won’t be a technological thing. I guess if I had to pick one, it’s really- even though I understand how fast it moves, the speed at which computing power is advancing is staggering. Things we didn’t think we could do five years ago, we can do now, you know, in the palm of my hand. So that’s cool, but it’s not unexpected. I think the most unexpected thing about it has been how interested so many people have been. And I often say that it’s because nobody did anything last year and we just had happened to do something. I don’t know. But I guess the most unexpected thing out of it was that IBM has been brilliant. They’ve been fantastic to work with. They have really blown me away with their generosity, and we’ve had the great pleasure to work with a broad slice of that company and never meet a person that we didn’t like, that didn’t have a genuine and profound interest in what we were doing and what they did. And they said something really funny, they said that it’s quite odd that it took an unmanned vessel that has nobody on it, an AI based ship, to humanize AI. That’s the most unexpected thing, that this autonomous vessel, this sort of spaceship-looking boat is very humanizing. I got up in the middle of the night once, when it was going out to sea, you know, we’re like 400 miles offshore in the first attempt to cross, and I logged into the portal and there’s, like, 30,000 people logged in looking at the camera feed from the vessel. That’s been really unexpected. I’m really appreciative at the level of interest, but I’m still baffled by it.

Tony
What you just said, it really ties in how you said that even though you’re interested in tech, you value people. You value connecting with people, and to see this project and so many people become invested in it, I can only imagine that it’s super overwhelming.

Brett
It’s awesome. And they’re all fun and interesting and brilliant, you know, asking about the vessel. It does literally get overwhelming, so we have to post more to answer questions. But now we’ve built this chat bot that’s really super- hyper-sophisticated that can synthesize data across all the instrumentation on the ship, that can actually mine the data entries and synthesize a response. That’s awesome. That’s IBM. That’ll help us talk to people more. Yeah. And the whole thing that has really shocked me about this unmanned, autonomous AI project is the level of interest and the number of people, and then the fantastic people we have the pleasure to work with.

Tony
Oh, that’s a very unique response. I thought you were going to tell me one specific aspect of this project.

Brett
No, it is the people, that’s the best part. That’s why I’m more and more encouraged every day and less… I’m discouraged about a lot of things in the world, but this is one of these things, AI and this drive to augmented intelligence, I am more and more encouraged about the possibility that we’re not completely doomed every day that I work in this particular area.

Tony
Yeah.

Brett
I mean, it sounds crazy, but it’s true. And even people panicking about climate change, this is one of the fundamental things we could actually do to- not Mayflower per se, but this type of thing. This technology can actually help us get our arms around, you know, maybe it’s okay. Maybe there’s a lot we don’t know, maybe it’s not as bad as we think. Or maybe it is, but maybe we’ll also discover answers that we can’t even contemplate or formulate questions for right now that will help us.  So I’m on the side of science, and if these are the people I get to work with in this field, then I’m actually more hopeful.

Tony
Right. Again, relating to people along your path, who’s someone who’s been very influential in your life, where they’ve impacted you and how they’ve shaped how you think about the world.

Brett
That’s super easy. I can give you three people right off, I can give you four. Absolutely. That is super easy. So first and foremost, my mom and my dad, who worked hard every day of their life, who—I was the first person in my family to go to college, go to university—who believed profoundly in education, and really had strong moral centers and had extremely deep work ethics. We didn’t grow up with very much, we were quite poor, but there wasn’t a day that they didn’t put us first and work hard to improve our lives, and always valued education above all things, and always supported, for the most part, the choices I made and wanted the best for me. I can’t say enough about them. They were the absolute number one and two, the joint number one place.

And then in university, an absolutely brilliant and wonderful woman, Elizabeth Will, who was a scholar par excellence in Roman history and archaeology. And then later in life working in the Marine Sonic Technology company, when I left grad school to do some work in industry in underwater sonar imaging technology work with Marty Wilcox, who is probably the smartest person I’ve ever had the great pleasure to meet, and taught me more in the few years I worked for him than the entirety of my education to that point. And most importantly, beyond all other things, gave me the best example, beyond my parents, of putting your ego aside, and that being right and wrong were factual matters, not emotional matters.

Tony
That’s very profound. Very humble, I think. For people like myself, or young emerging professionals, what is the most important trait someone would need to embody to work at the intersection of AI?

Brett
Oh, that’s easy. And it is universal. We suffer broadly from a decision-making disorder in our society. We keep seeking consensus, we keep looking for somebody else to be in charge, and somebody else to be responsible. Innovation is not a consensus sport. I don’t mean that you don’t work with people, obviously, I’ve worked with hundreds of people that I respect. But all of those people that are successful have a common trait, which is that they’ll make a choice. And they’ll accept the responsibility that comes with that authority. And then they accept their failures and their successes with grace. So I think you need to bear in mind that the consequence of an incorrect decision is trivial universally, in almost all things. Because there were many, many billions of years when you didn’t exist, and there will be many, many billions of years when you don’t exist again. The part in the middle is extremely short. And if the choice you’re making will not lead to your death or somebody else’s, then I would submit to you that the consequence of not acting is significantly more dire than the consequence of making a choice that might be incorrect. Because in the end, you have that tiny amount of time. And while time isn’t the most important thing, because your life is finite, it absolutely is one of the primary qualities. So my advice to you is to make decisions and take chances and try things. It’s a trite answer, but so what if you make a mistake, everybody does. So what your business fails, fine, start another one. Take a job. Work with people you trust. But be the guy who will make the call. Be the guy who won’t be looking around like, well, whose responsibility is this? Yours! I strongly encourage people to be the guy in the room who puts his hand up and says, I’ll do it. Take a shot. You might get it wrong. Fine.

Tony
Yeah.

Brett
Don’t be the guy who didn’t do anything except think about doing something in the time you have.

Tony
That helps a lot. Someone could have just said, time, value time, or value discipline. It’s very nice to hear all of it enveloped.

Tony
So I read one of the articles that was published on you and you had a quote where you said, I want kids to be fearless and to have the determination to achieve. It’s about science and adventure and rekindling, a sense of wonder.

Brett
Yep, totally. Isn’t it a sad place if you think everything has already been discovered? Doesn’t it make the world sort of sad? Because it’s also not true.

Tony
Yeah, I think in the news maybe a week or two ago, it was saying how they found some planet, or something like that, that’s even closer to the sun. But then what we’ve been taught-

Brett
Yeah, what’s really weird is like, even our own planet, I mean, not a day goes by that we don’t find a new species of virus, bacteria, plankton, or bizarre new- what I guess they call extremophiles, organisms in the sea, right? Living in impossible places, living in impossible pressure, impossible depth, in things that are unimaginable. And someone might have the audacity to say that there’s no life on other planets in our solar system. Nonsense. We just haven’t figured out how to look. And we’re going to look more and more, and that’s really important. But we also need to look here more. There’s so much we don’t understand about the deep ocean, about those processes in the deep sea, we’re barely scratching the surface. You know, you go out in the ocean with a bucket, you pick up a bucket of water, you take it back to a laboratory, I guarantee you each and every bucket that everyone takes out, there’s something in there that no one has ever seen before. 

Tony
The Longitude of Imagination series provides its listeners an opportunity to learn how professionals in different sectors approach imagination, and how ideas turn into action for the good of humanity.

The Mayflower 400 would be the first fully autonomous vessel to sail across the Atlantic. A feat that would allow us to explore uncharted waters. Yet, it’s quite remarkable that Brett still feels overwhelmed by the huge following this project has attracted. From our interview, I see not only a deep thinker, but also someone who was raised to value hard-work and creative thinking by a supportive network of family and mentors. Pursuing big ideas requires courage — the courage to take risks and accountability for the decisions we make. Most importantly, the courage to fail gracefully and carry on the next day.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and in the comments, or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. We would love to hear from you.

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