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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."
Are you serious? Mining is and always has been the POSTER CHILD for worker exploitation. Your notion that the government is somehow trampling on the poor put-upon mine owners is laughable on its face. Are you choosing to forget that hundreds of workers were killed (less than 100 years ago) by company goons for trying to unionize? Are you choosing to forget the thousands of miners who have died due to the incredibly lax and callous safety practices of mine owners, both from cave-ins and from firedamp?
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.
So why do we let national resources be private land?
In America, if you own the land, you own the mineral resources under it. Many other countries nationalize mineral resources. Nearly all those countries are poorer and less productive than America, especially in the mining sector.
Resource extraction should not be profitable for individuals, it should be profitable for the nation as a whole.
Karl Marx would have been in total agreement. Your idea has been tried. You might want to read some history books to see how it turned out.
Yes their pay is going down. To $0. In these systems one person oversees multiple vehicles so they can get rid of many people. And of course that's not saying the drivers are able to transfer over to operating the remote controlled vehicles so it's possible that all of the drivers are let go and new people are brought in.
Over time, all jobs are made obsolete. The longshoreman career was made obsolete because of automation. The people who made vacuum tubes we made mostly redundant becauseof the transistor. The railroad workers faced a big reduction when we switched from steam locos to diesel - steam locomotives are tremendous powerful bits of technology, but are filthy and take insane levels of maintenance.
Two tractor steam plowing has come and gone, nothing stays the same.
Even over my career, instead of complaining about my jerb becoming obsolete, I adapted, learned new things, and didn't insist that what I originally did would continue forever. Where do we say - enough? No more technology, no more progress?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.