I learned about the consequences of overloading the human operator when working on the primary UI for a manufacturing business. A natural inclination is to put things like confirmation dialogs around dangerous activities. I had managers telling me that one confirmation wasn't enough and that we had to add additional because people were still missing.
Eventually, we tried removing the dialogs altogether and the incident rate approached zero. If you take away the guardrails completely, it radically alters the psychology and game theory around user interaction. Imagine climbing a tall building with multiple layers of protection vs having none at all.
I strongly believe in ideas like "safety 3rd". It's not that I want the humans to be maimed by the machines. Quite the opposite. The difficulty is in understanding higher order consequences of "safety" and avoiding the immediate knee-jerk satisfaction that first order resolutions may provide.
Excessive alarms aren't just a problem at sea.
There have also been fatal aviation accidents where there's a problem with a common system (a dip in the power supply or hydraulic pressure, or a problem with a critical sensor) and dozens of systems sound alarms at the same time [1].
And for a technology example, a database server disappearing might raise a single alarm, but the applications that rely on that database might raise countless alarms as attempts to connect fail over and over again.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Air_France_Flight...
This is the flight where one pilot tried to pull up to recover from the stall, and the warning for dual input (which Airbus just averages together) was snoozed by the system yelling about the other errors and was reduced to a light they didn't notice. The captain commented towards the end"no don't climb". The stall alarm was the one the system chose to display over all others and was mishandled (by the pilot who didn't know how to recover from a stall).
Boeing there's physical feed back, when one control moves so does the other.
This was not the first time pilots were having conflicting input without noticing.
>https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf
IMO that’s the wrong take about that crash. The stall warning stopped once the attitude was above a certain amount, which was an insane decision on airbus’s part.
You can see in the CVR that the stall indicator stopped many times despite them being in a stall the entire time. The pilot (like every other pilot) knew how to recover from a stall on paper. But he had the plane telling him his airspeed was good (frozen tube) and that bringing the pitch down was causing a stall.
This has been a major problem in hospitals where there are many false alarms and often concurrent alarms for hospital beds: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3928208/
We talked about alarms and alarm fatigue often when considering whether to show an alarm and at what priority when I was involved in a medical device.
When everything is important nothing can be important. I was particularly struck by the reduction of crew rest to service alarms. I'd sort of thought this was a problem for watch standers only but it makes sense that some alarms require a specialist or the crews are too thin. Heck, I bet the captain, engineer and first mate all have monitors in their staterooms.
Ah, but you see, the alarms from the device I am building are most important, because somebody might sue me if I can't shift responsibility onto the user.
Same sort of problem we have in modern cars? Speed, lane assistance, blind spot, etc, sometimes apparently beeping for the hell of it.
For some it's distracting and frustrating, even increasing aggression and thereby increasing the risk. For others it breeds complacency, a "boy who cried wolf" scenario such that the alarms become meaningless. Either way, it doesn't work as intended.
Interesting to know ships have followed the same pattern, apparently to a worse extent. I wonder how many more walks of life, and industries, are suffering in the same way.
I had the misfortunate of needing to hire a car in the UK last year. Ended up with an entry level 2025 Kia (Ceed Estate). Compared with the 2012 Audi A4 I'm used to driving it was a nightmare.
Similar experience, lots of flashing and beeping which is just distracting whilst also being wrong often enough to be really annoying (this is a known problem with speed limits).
Exceeding the speed limit, needing to change gear and by far the worst, active lane assist which pushes you back into your lane if you cross the white line without indicating (I only found this out afterwards as the hire place didn't mention it or leave a manual) and something which can happen frequently if you're driving down narrow country roads where indicating wouldn't have seemed appropriate and may just confuse others.
I spoke to one of the mechanics at my local garage who said you can't permanently turn these features off as they turn back on when you start the car.
I wonder if anyone has who's had an accident caused by being distracted by all these alarms has successfully sued?
I rented a car last July, and I specifically picked out a small one because I wouldn't need to carry any cargo or passengers around.
As soon as I drove off the lot, 3 warning indicator lamps lit up, including "Tire Pressure" so I stopped at a service station, thought for a moment, then drove back to the rental lot.
The other indicator had something to do with crash protection, and I think we worked out how to disable the system. After putting air into my tires, I was good to go.
So I'm thankful that those lamps indicated some actual conditions. I always kind of make a point of taking out the Owner's Manual and leafing through it, however briefly, just to see that it covers everything. They're still fairly comprehensive. I really appreciate that.
My Volkswagen has assistance features which routinely fail on snowy days and can’t seem to be disabled. The best you can do is disable them for a minute (!) at which point they start blaring again. Its ironic because the time you need the most focus is the time the car lets you focus the least.
It can absolutely be disabled they just wouldn't get the same brownies points in EuroNCAP by allowing _you_ to disable it.
If I spent more than 50k on a car like that, I would absolutely return it and file a complaint.
Car companies care a great deal about after sales stats. This trend will continue because we as users on average tolerate it.
Direct link to the report PDF: https://maritime.lr.org/AM-report-2026
I didn't look at the PDF, but the sample size reported in the article is 11 ships(!), which makes me wonder how this might look across a larger population of ships.
I wonder how much labor expense has to be saved to make up for a future catastrophic event?
Internalize gains, externalizing cost of events or accidents.