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."

Comments

Mines are almost completely self contained

[rsilvergun]

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.

In other words, what's happened to farming

[sandbagger]

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.

Re:what drives automation

[Dutch Gun]

Regardless of the humanitarian merits of high wages, good benefits, and better safety regulations (which I'd hope everyone agrees is a good thing), the simple fact is that those all increase the cost of labor, which in turn provides a greater incentive to automate production as much as possible, reducing production costs.

Automation of labor-intensive tasks is a difficult thing. A high degree of automation tends to benefit the economy as a whole by producing more consumer goods for less cost, increasing the purchasing power of the common citizen. Unfortunately, it also has an immediate detrimental effect on the directly affected workers. I think this is why most people agree that it's critical to provide a safety net with unemployment and retraining, to help minimize the human impact of disruptive change like this.

For the most part, I think societies have been reasonably adept at finding other employment for workers as old industries scale down and other industries ramp up or spring into existence. For instance, my job (a videogame programmer) simply didn't exist a generation ago, and is largely possible because many people now have a bit of extra money to spend on a PC, videogame console, and the occasional $60 videogame. We just have to hope that trend continues - that these sort of advancements and transitions occur, but not so fast as to be too disruptive to society as a whole.