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Mines May Eliminate More Than Half Their Human Workers Within 10 Years (computerworld.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes ComputerWorld:
In the next decade, the mining industry may lose more than half of its jobs to automation, according to a new report... This industry is adopting self-driving trucks, automated loaders and automated drilling and tunnel-boring systems. It is also testing fully autonomous long-distance trains, which carry materials from the mine to a port...
A broader question is whether mining is a bellwether for other industries. There's no clear answer, but what Aaron Cosbey, a development economist and a report author, can say is this: "Where you can find robotic replacements for human labor you tend to do it." Cosbey estimates that automation will replace 40% to 80% of the workers at a mine...
Driverless technology can increase output up to 20%, while decreasing fuel consumption up to 15%, according to the article. "This will increase demand for people with IT skills who can set up and operate the automation systems -- but at far smaller numbers than the people automation displaces."
A broader question is whether mining is a bellwether for other industries. There's no clear answer, but what Aaron Cosbey, a development economist and a report author, can say is this: "Where you can find robotic replacements for human labor you tend to do it." Cosbey estimates that automation will replace 40% to 80% of the workers at a mine...
Driverless technology can increase output up to 20%, while decreasing fuel consumption up to 15%, according to the article. "This will increase demand for people with IT skills who can set up and operate the automation systems -- but at far smaller numbers than the people automation displaces."
He will bring all these coal jobs back and make sure this rigged automation crap never happens...
A broader question is whether mining is a bellwether for other industries.
Yes, it is, but we talk about that all the time and it's boring. Let's mine this topic for some other nuggets of value. Ore do you really want to take this opportunity for granite? Let's not cave in to the pressure to rehash that argument, and start with a clean slate. A boulder question would be weather the technology will translate to outer space. That other kind of thread hits rock bottom in a hurry.
Schist, I'm out of gneiss rock puns.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... it's not going to be a good day for people. Less safety and environmental requirements for non-people, and if they get crushed/buried there's no real negative press. Designed correctly, they can be rebuilt/repaired/dusted off and the work continued.
buddy of mine (pun not intended) is a part runner who sometimes delivers on the mines and they already control the roads so tightly that automation would be cake. Plus robots work around the clock, don't unionize and you don't go to jail for ignoring their safety.
The real question is, given that mines are natural resources why the *bleep* do we let so few people claim ownership of them? I suppose we could just tax the end product on the way out too, but we don't even do much of that. We just sorta give away something that's the birthright of all mankind without batting an eye. Not saying we go full on commie ( the wars and violence that come out of that would just shift the ownership ) but there ought to be a better way.
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"and can monitor itself and signal emerging problems".....and what else?
Have gnu, will travel.
I read the recent Ars piece on how the pizza biz uses robots to make pizza. At first this was a bit of a surprise/news to me, but then you immediately realize how repetitive the job is. Great use for robots -- faster, less waste, tireless, etc. But also, great job for a human to no longer do -- brain-deadening, low-paying and a RSI maker if ever there was one.
I come here for the love
You do it when government imposes massive mandatory benefits on employers and raises the cost of labor. That is, the primary benefit of robots is that they don't unionize, don't get minimum wage, don't need health insurance, don't need retirement plans, don't need worker's comp, and won't sue over discrimination or injuries.
Of course, I don't think that's a bad thing either in this case. Robots replacing people in dangerous, boring, repetitive jobs is a good thing for everybody.
No more mining jobs means less voters having a stake in the mining industry, much of which is the mining of coal. Less mining jobs also means less rural mining boom towns which inevitably turn into ghost towns.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I understand that companies want to reduce their workforce, but using mines the eliminate human employees is going too far. Can't they just pay redundancy instead of resorting to blowing up their own workers?
Automated equipment is a fixed and predictable cost. It does require more technical people that can operate and fix them in the field. It also means less resources and planning for safety are needed for human personal with fewer people hurt in the field. Less training is needed so increased predictable production can be seen shortly after expenditure for automated machinery.
Overall this means mining operations can invest more predictably and scale linearly. So mines can be larger and with almost as many workers but in technical roles.
It's a field where I feel safe in predicting that the automation will produce more jobs. Unlike automated garbage trucks and freight hauling.
at least over here in the States is that they exist to shield the company from property taxes and liabilities involved with owning the land. The leases are a fraction of those costs. In America we have a thing called "Trusts" where land is held "In Trust". What it really means is the gov't is holding onto the land for a wealthy land owner until it's worth owning (usually if they want to build houses on it). That way no property taxes.
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and a few IT jobs replace 'em (probably H1-Bs, since this work is so new it's easy to say there'd be no local talent that qualifies). Can I has basic income yet?
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Something that's happening might happen more in the long term. If it does then it might mean something.
Don't you people ever get tired of worrying about stuff that might someday happen, maybe in 10 or 20 years? Don't you have problems now, or something next month or next year to worry about instead?
we just finished prosecuting a mine exec for ignoring safety. It was a big deal because he'll do some jail time, which has almost never happened. The saddest thing is that somewhere is somebody who'll argue we shouldn't have prosecuted that guy because this is what will happen. E.g. it's better to have a job you get killed at than no job at all. Even when there's no good reason for that job to exist anymore. People just can't get over the idea that if you don't work you don't eat.
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It depends on (a) how much cheaper it is to mine stuff and (b) the price elasticity of demand.
For example, suppose the price of coal drops so much that people use twice as much of it. You'll end up with exactly the same number of people working at coal mines. In that case the impact would be to stymie any attempts to reduce pollution by burning less coal.
On the other hand, suppose coal demand is inelastic; then you'll have half the number of workers but the companies in the business are more profitable; you may have more mines that continue to operate.
Third possibility: coal prices will go down AND coal demand will go down because of environmental regulations. Then everyone hurts except people with automation skills and vendors with automation products.
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I thought mining was already eliminating half the humans who worked it. Guess it's safer than I expected.
Some humans still work in mines.
for neither man nor beast and beasts are no longer used.
Coal mines in southern Ohio used dogs to pull carts out of the mines as
they fit they height of the coal seam! Some hard rock mines had tunnels that
were high enough for the mules to walk in them. They were worked underground
until they could almost no longer see from the darkness and then moved back to the surface.
Many people have been killed in accidents and suffer from respiratory diseases from the dust in mines.
Automation is the way to go for mining.
What about scanning the tracks and moving manual switches? also unions and other safety issues? Look at how long it's taking to get PTC to be installed so autonomous long-distance trains make take a long time for systems to even be installed.
still need local NON IT Repair & Maintenance techs on site to keep the systems running + IT workers running the system with maybe even local IT tech to keep the networking parts running.
Isn't it universally acknowledged that mining is dirty, dangerous, difficult, and a threat to worker's health? I'd think eliminating as many mining jobs as possible would be seen as a good thing. Same for all the other industries where the work itself is said to be bad for workers: fishing (dangerous), truck driving (dangerous, deleterious to health), fast food (poorly compensated, demeaning, dead end), etc.
Finally! All these safety regulations will be enforced because mining Co's won't want to damage their precious intelligent machines.
As the cost of energy rises in the near future, automation and the cost of manufacturing that automation, will become prohibitively expensive. Add in the bankruptcy of governments and the financial system and we're more likely heading back to a serf economy than one of automated nirvana.
For Pete's sake, first it's H-1B's, and now damned mimes!
Table-ized A.I.
After having failed to parse "Mines May Eliminate More Than Half Their Human Workers Within 10 Years" as "Land Mines May Eliminate More Than Half Their Human Workers...," I was relieved - after reading TFS - to discover that nobody was actually going to be killed by these nefarious mines!
When I read the title I first thought mines as in land mines, and then I thought, "Yeah... that's kind of the point..."
This is awesome. This is what we want.
Machines doing all the dirty, unhealthy, badly paid and dangerous work.
Nice to hear we're finally moving along another few steps in this regard.
Although I have to admit this is not really that much of a surprise. This has been going on since the dawn of industrial mining. Back in 18 hundred something it was completely normal for 10-year olds working 16 hours a day in the mines and dying very early deaths. Specialised machines came in and the children and the slavery went. Good thing!
We still have that in Afrika and other parts of the world (Fun fact: the rare-earth metals in your smartphone are paid for with blood and slavery) but as soon as robots are cheap enough to replace even those contemporary slaves, that will be a reason to celebrate.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Relieve the nightmarish congestion in (for example) the San Francisco Bay Area by tunnelling new freeways. If Tech can bring the cost of tunnels down far enough, we could really improve cities everywhere.
If its mines vs humans now, I am ready. I have been training for years using the tactical simulator codenamed "minesweeper.exe", waiting for a day like this to arrive.
-
People have been building such systems for quite a while: long-duration robust robots that have to survive in hostile situations without continuous human assistance. Just look at what Liquid Robotics builds.
The biggest change to labour -- probably -- has been the early 20th century creation of the tractor and its attendant grain handling machines to agriculture. It wiped out the largest employee type in the world - agricultural labour. Of course there are plenty of people picking produce today but it's a fraction of the population compared to our grandparents' era.
That mines have become automated with pneumatic diggers happened in a generation ago and those of us who are old enough to remember the miner's strikes of the 1970s and 1980s watched entire communities vanish from the map. (Watch the film Brassed Off as an example with the amazing Pete Posthewait.) That digitization and robotics have now matured enough to finish the job is really an end game, not anything new.
I was up north when GPSs came in and guides were an ancient and honoured profession that got wiped out in ten years at the lumber camps.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
it's almost all middle class whites without college educations. They're generally doing well for themselves and when asked why Trump they say it's for the country and their children. 538's got a decent article on Trump Supporter demographics. They key to Trump supporters is they _vote_. The urban poor don't (it's debatable if it's laziness or voter suppression).
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I've got a buddy who's in about the lowest income position you can be and when faced with the prospect that we might give Fast Food workers "free" money when we don't need them to work anymore (because robots took their jerbs) he was genuinely uncomfortable. He might even agree if you press him on it but when he gets to the polls that's not how his 'gut' will tell him to vote.
Giving people who don't work money just plain _feels_ bad. Entitlement is a bad word around here too. Think about how much of a backlash there's been with that 'everybody gets a gold star' style of teaching. That pisses everyone who works hard off.
Unless you're really, really smart then just working hard is not it's own reward. I don't say that because being smart makes these ideas palpable. When you're Albert Einstein level you can absorb yourself with problems and solutions that are beyond the vast majority of us. But thing is that's not nearly enough % of the population to base a society around...
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So when we replace notoriously dangerous, low-paying and skilled jobs with robots that can only kill themselves and nobody else, we then need to crow about how many jobs have been lost?
It's like the UK miner's strikes all over again. We can't sell the shit once we pull it out of the ground without lowering costs (which means lower wages for those people or more dangerous working conditions for the unscrupulous), but we have to preserve those jobs artificially so people have something to do during the day?
No.
Mining is prime candidate for automation. Long, repetitive, boring, dangerous conditions couple together really badly. especially where any kind of manual labour is involved too.
But when we automate it, the overtone is "Oh, no, we're losing jobs?"
You won't have to do much. Plug in a farmbot in your yard, which takes food to the kitchen bots. Sleep, tv
The company I work for does wholesale distribution, and the new warehouses it's building use half the people for the same amount of product shipped. Payback for the more expensive warehouse is 5-7 years. I would say pretty much every industry that has lots of manual labor will be automating as much as possible as soon as possible.
Once we begin colonizing Mars, this will be sooo important to have technologically. It's hardly a surprise and almost convincing that it's intentionally being developed. "If we can't do it on Earth, how will we do it on Mars?" A 40KM deep inverted pyramid on Mars would provide atmospheric pressure similar to Earth.
A lot of us educated, displaced by H1B workers will vote for Trump as well.
Not that he will fix it, but the message to both established parties has to get out*. Start paying attention to American workers FIRST, or we will toss your butts to the curb.
*Trump is not an establishment Republican, and that scares and pisses off the party. GOOD. It's the best we can do until we have a saner third-party candidate. (Johnson's ineptitude almost makes me want to cry. A decent Libertarian candidate could have picked up 15-20% in early polls and really blown this thing wide open.)
Mimes? Robot mimes are going to eliminate human workers?
Well, JFC. There goes white-glove service...
What?
Oh, mines. I can dig that. I saw Zoolander. I know about the black lung, you bet.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Duh, I always upgrade my miners the first chance I get. A dude with a pickaxe can't mine the gold fast enough for me.
Have gnu, will travel.
Gnu is not Unix, but it is ungulate.
Also related: Wildebeest is not Windows.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Mining has always been one of the most dangerous jobs that humans have ever had, and traditionally one of the most disproportionately low-paying compared to how dangerous it is. Of all the applications for so-called 'AI' (still bugs me how that term is misused, by the way), so-called 'self-driving' technolgy, and automation technology that put human workers out of jobs, this is one that I definitely approve of, so that humans don't have to die horribly or be horribly injured in mining accidents. Of course it'll take putting a gun to some people's heads to make them be responsible for re-educating and re-training displaced mine workers for new, safer jobs (something I feel should be a requirement), but at least this is a step in the right direction.
This has been going on for a while. Rock face miners were replaced with mechanical excavators 20-30 years ago. Said excavators became remote controlled 15-20 years ago. They became semi-independent 10-15 years ago. Dirt haulers in open pit mines became self-driven about 10 years ago.
Mining is an ideal case for robot substitution. Robots do best in jobs that are not suitable for humans, either too dangerous, too heavy, too small or too repetitive.
Tax the robots and hook me up with universal basic income instead.
"This will increase demand for people with IT skills who can set up and operate the automation systems -- but at far smaller numbers than the people automation displaces."
Because who has heard of automation reducing the requirement for IT staff?
Nobody has the right to a job or even universal basic income/welfare.
Rights are whatever we agree they are, or enough of us to make it happen anyway. There's no such thing as natural rights. Nature, if it had consciousness, would laugh at such an idea.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A government's JOB is (as a representative of the people as a whole) to do what the people want it to do. A government is supposed to act in ways that an individual cannot to achieve things an individual cannot. So if the people deem that everyone has the right to a job or even basic income/welfare, then who are you to say otherwise.
I think every human that looses their job to a robot must continue to be paid full wages and benefits untill or forever. our society depends on people having money that means jobs, skilled jobs, and non skilled jobs. If this continues i see a huge war comming between the rich and the not rich and the poor its going to happen just wonder if i will get to see it. thier are only so many Mcdonalds jobs out thier and seems they want to replace the human their as well.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Also these lighthouse workers, how many lighthouses can there possibly be that need workers?!
Agriculture, mining, forestry, fishing, etc.
This trend has occurred for literally centuries. Each new wave of technological innovation eliminates jobs that escaped the previous wave. And I think this is a Good Thing for humanity in aggregate, even if it causes local disruption and job loss.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Trump has strong support in regions that engage in resource cultivation and extraction. Even if the citizens of these states are economically marginalized, politically they exercise disproportionate power due to how the republic is configured, e.g., electoral college votes.
The reality is that IF Trump is elected and IF he somehow gets Congress to agree to tariffs (or whatever meddling he concocts to appeal to the rubes), artificially increasing costs by government intervention -- while we're also in an artificial zero interest rate environment -- will only accelerate automation. Financing is really damn cheap, and the prospect of paying people more money is a strong inducement to eliminate their jobs, especially on the low-end where government regulation already makes hiring people needlessly difficult, expensive, and convoluted.
Many years ago I lived in area that once had an abundance of logging jobs. Most of them went away -- even though plenty of timber was still harvested -- due to improved efficiency and automation. But displaced workers blamed those damn tree huggers for their woes. The main driver -- even if regulation has some impact -- was and is automation. However, if you're smart enough to see how all this fits together, you're probably not the kind of person to sit around collecting unemployment checks and voting for people who want to redistribute wealth and/or meddle with the economy for your benefit. You see how the landscape changes and you change with it.
That being said, I absolutely understand the populist anger when banks and other dipshits are bailed out, and people are not. The only sensible answer is to stop playing favorites across the board and let the economy naturally adjust.
They are fairly effective at eliminating workers through black lung, and mine disasters.
Sounds like they are going to ramp this up.
But seriously, if people were thinking, they'd realize that anyone attempting to save jobs by allowing more coal to be burned will not succeed in the long run since less workers will be needed. Just more money for the owners.
Since when did they stop taking your money for delivering bits of paper?
Where are you going to get the money to buy that farmbot? The steel the robots used to build it isn't free, you know?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I think this is because people are thinking about it the wrong way ... and changing people minds about something is hard. ...
We have been raised to think you work to get a reward, if you don't work, we deserve nothing
The basic income thing does not need to change that or be seen as contradicting that
In fact, a lot of people give to charity, helps their neighbors, ... ... ...
A lot of people would agree that starvation is unthinkable and unacceptable in our day and age
A lot of people don't want homeless people and beggars roaming the streets in their neighborhoods
Having a roof and food should be the right of every citizen, I don't see this as entitlement, more like leveling the playing field for the poor ... ... I'm sure you can find anecdotes about poor people making it to the top but they are more exception than the rule and serve to hide the fact that it is really harder to climb starting from lower ...
Poor people are at a disadvantage from birth: no connections to leverage, no help and useful pointers from their environment to improve their situation, no safety net
Of course, the basic income should be implemented in a way to reduce abuse as much as possible like giving it in the form of food stamps and housing stamps may be ...
But I think it is a good idea to start to transform our societies from a work to survive principle to a work to fulfill yourself and advance mankind principle
Having a roof and food should be the right of every citizen, I don't see this as entitlement, more like leveling the playing field for the poor ...
What makes it a right? Where can you exercise this right? And who's going to pay for it?
For me, the enormous problem is simply that once you no longer work for a living, you lose a great deal of power even in the presence of these supposed rights. You're beholden to the provider of the "right". They not you get to decide where you'll live. You get to vote for their political policies or risk loss of your right. And you don't have any options when not if they overextend the nation's finances and promise too much to too many people.
My view is that a basic income can work if a) the payout depends on the health of the society with higher payouts when society is doing well (perhaps a fixed rate based on GDP or income), and b) is coupled with a complete elimination of minimum wage laws.
Just wondering.
Where are you going to get the money to buy that farmbot? The steel the robots used to build it isn't free, you know?
The steel will be very low cost, since it will also be produced by robots. I'm wondering about the end game here. When almost everything is automated, then the cost of goods is almost (but not quite) zero. So, everyone can have the basic necessities for almost nothing, which could be paid for with unemployment benefits (maybe?). The asymptotic result is 90+% of humanity getting necessities provided to them, with
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
IMHO, this would be an ideal use-case for telerobotics and augmented reality. There would still be human operators but they would be in a control center up on the surface.
An adequate basic income would eliminate the need for minimum wage laws. There would be no economic coercion to take any job, no matter how bad, and so employers would have to pay enough to attract workers, and workers would frequently work for less because that's what people do with secondary sources of income.
A basic income would need some sort of floor, adjusted for inflation, and I'm not going to get into specifics here. It needs to be something people can rely on. How it varies, and why, I'll leave for later, when I see something not entirely vague.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"This will increase demand for people with IT skills who can set up and operate the automation systems -- but at far smaller numbers than the people automation displaces."
Tractors decimated farm employment.
Time to bring back horses, obviously.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
As you say in the distant past a mine was worked by a town full of people with pickaxes. That gradually moved to less people and more machines. In case anyone has been keeping track it has also led to economies of scale for those machines.
So if people think the mining companies are going to make a small army of "Minerbots" they are not understanding the trend. What they will automate are massive monster systems of facility and machine to a scale likely unheard of previously. Just like those town full of pickaxe wielding miners couldn't conceive of removing the entire top off a mountain in a short time span, in the future it will be the whole mountain.
What does that really mean. Well scale works a number of different ways, and one of those will inevitably be that of environmental impact. So yeah, there may be less impact on say human workers at a dangerous job, but the landscape will likely be changing at a rate that will have a much larger impact on the environment at again a scale not yet conceived.