My new science fiction/science fact article for Science Robotics is out on why deep ocean robotics is hard. Especially when trying to bring up a sunken submarine 3 miles underwater, which the CIA actually did in 1974. It's even harder if you're trying to bring up an alien spaceship- which is the plot of Harry Turtledove's new sci-fi novel Three Miles Under. Though the expedition was 50 years before the OceanGate Titan tragedy, the same challenges exist for today's robots. The robotics science in the book is very real, the aliens, not so much.

It was the year 1956. A small group of scientists had gathered at Dartmouth University for a summer research project. They wanted to understand whether every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence "can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." John McCarthy, a US computer scientist, managed to persuade fellow scientists at the conclave to use the term'Artificial Intelligence' to differentiate the