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Just build one of these but fucking massive.
There you go, automated shipbreaking.
Yeah life would be so simple if shit like this would scale infinitely. Sadly, you can't do that. Also, there is a shitton of other metals and materials inside the ship. Shipbreaking is about recycling, not destroying a ship.
Yeah, my comment was mostly made in jest.
Without a disposable army of third world workers, they'd probably just drag all this stuff to the middle of the Pacific and scuttle it. The raw materials just aren't worth the cost of retrieving them at first world wages and safety standards.
Realistically, the only thing that can sort of fix it is changing how ships are built to make them easier to recycle. Not a lot you can do with the existing ones, but the ship builders might be more inclined to fix it if you charged them the recycling cost at the point of supply, with easier, safer recycling meaning a lower charge. Be a slow process though.
Don't need AI for that.