Watch Live as IBM's A.I. Mayflower Ship Crosses the Atlantic

"Seagulls," said Andy Stanford-Clark, excitedly. In fact, you can totally ignore them." Stanford-Clark, the chief technology officer for IBM in the U.K. and Ireland, was exuding nervous energy. It was the afternoon before the morning when, at 4 a.m. British Summer Time, IBM's Mayflower Autonomous Ship -- a crewless, fully autonomous trimaran piloted entirely by IBM's A.I., and built by non-profit ocean research company ProMare -- was set to commence its voyage from Plymouth, England. to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. And now, after countless tests and hundreds of thousands of hours of simulation training, it was about to set sail for real. Stanford-Clark was running through the potential risks. Seagulls, he pointed out, were something of a false alarm. From an image-recognition perspective, they were a challenge because they had a tendency of getting right up in the camera lens so that they looked like enormous winged obstacles that needed to be avoided at all costs. But they had a tendency ...