Nearly posted this at the time - coz it sounded suss - a $147 mil NZ navy ship ran aground & sank off the coast of Samoa a couple of months ago. How does a modern warship run aground in familiar territory - with all the advances of modern technology ...?

Surprisingly quickly, a report has been released. Though it's a classic new-normal investigation where the guiding principle is ass-covering, not uncovering.

Rear Admiral Garin Golding: The direct cause of the grounding has been determined as a series of human errors which meant the ship’s autopilot was not disengaged when it should have been

That's a contradiction right there. It's human error coz the auto-pilot was engaged? A series of human-errors, no less. Wouldn't there be a switch & a large light on the dashboard to know whether the auto-pilot is on or not? How do a series of humans, tasked with sailing the ship, not know that? What's the point of them being on the ship if they don't?

There's gotta be a deeper explanation.

Rear Admiral Golding: The crew did not realise Manawanui remained in autopilot and, as a consequence, mistakenly believed its failure to respond to direction changes was the result of a thruster control failure.

Remaining in autopilot resulted in the ship maintaining a course toward land, until grounding and eventually stranding. (& sinking)

Whoops! I'd love to see the control cabin cctv leading up to it. I'm surprised auto-pilot doesn't have some mechanism for detecting land & not ploughing straight into it, but maybe it was just set for full-steam ahead.

Anyway you look at it though, it's a case of automation causing an undesirable outcome.

Either humans have become so lulled into automation that they've outsourced their brains to it (to the point they didn't realize the auto-pilot was even on! It's like a stoner movie), or: the machine ran amok. Or possibly a bit of both.