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.

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.

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...

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?