Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
> "Rigs have gotten so much more efficient that the shale industry can use about half as many as it did at the height of the boom in 2014 to suck the same amount of oil out of the ground."
Drilling rigs don't suck oil out of the ground, they drill a hole... that's why they call them drilling rigs not sucking rigs. Also, we don't call it sucking, rather "production", and that's handled by other equipment... assuming the well needs to be sucked on.
The "Iron Roughneck" has been around a long time.
I would like to see all the charts in this article to go back to 2000. New drilling technology is not adopted as fast as some in SV might imagine. Wells are expensive and dangerous. Innovation is rare and new tech takes a long time to gain acceptance. I'm not saying headcount will shrink over time but this industry is cyclical and demand has been increasing and will continue too as the rest of the world develops a middle class.
> That means an engineer can design an oil well at his desk. With the press of a button, an automated system would identify the equipment needed from a supplier, create a 3D model and send instructions for building it out into the field, Hashmi says. “That is automation.”
LOLOLOL yah, trust me that Fluor, Parsons, Jacobs and all the other oil and gas engineering firms would love this and have been trying to build or integrate things like this for a long time. The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software. Thankfully for the American worker they suck pretty bad, otherwise half the white collar jobs in the US wouldn't exist. Also, this shit is complicated AF and building a petroleum plant isn't just about the chemical process it will complete. Jesus the naiveté in this article. Oh and who designs custom well heads anymore?
Literally all of my surrounding neighbors are mechanical engineers for oilfield service companies and the common thing we've talked about recently IS automation. However the reality isn't robots but better engineering/process that lets a part run 50x as long with a greater prediction for need of replacement.
You don't have to keep 100 hands on a drilling site for the peak demand if you can effectively schedule.
Exactly, which is why automation is going to kill so many white-collar jobs. "Effectively schedule" means let a computer do it, not Sally Scheduler who has been doing it in Excel only because they forced her to stop using paper and pen.
This article is basically saying "the planes practically fly themselves", and I'm like "yah but do you still see two pilots in the cockpit?".
There might be 50 extra people on a drill site but there's 5,000 in the back office whose jobs could be replaced with some quick programming and no robots.
From my point of view, anything that can measure demand will eventually have automatic scheduling. All those jobs go poof
I think back office is still the current whale in the space. Some of it is harder to determine especially with async work. You are right that thousands of people will continue to lose their jobs here. Back in the day it took my college a long time to process graduation applications. I got a job in that sector that sold software to manage things like students. 6 months of processing buffer down to a button press that takes a few minutes to do everything. So many paper pushes, managers, and other "useless" jobs will go away. Right after that will be those jobs that make sure everything is in order/correct according to business rules and laws. After that will be the huge disruption of lawyers and doctors.
Honestly, I am pessimistic of the future because I see it this way and do not see any political system in my country that is trying to prepare for mass unemployment or people without relevant skills.
Is that the US? The reasons I ask is because the Trump administration seems to be under the impression that they can "undo" globalization and manufacturing jobs and coal industry jobs are coming back. They seem to be intent on fixing the the former wave of job disruption instead of focusing on the next one. I'm afraid the former ship has sailed and not sure it can be fixed but at least the next one could be prepared for. And there was almost no mention of this on the campaign trail from any candidates.
Interesting Alvin Toffler who died recently and there was a discussion about him on HN talked about many of these things( disruption in post industrial society) that are coming to fruition now in his book Future Shock which was published in 1970.
You can see similar patterns with eLearning and performance management technology. The former decreases the cost of turnover for a firm, the latter eliminates the employee's ability to shirk which in turn frees the firm from having to offer Efficiency Wages. The firm is now able to adopt a policy of "burn 'em out and replace 'em" and offer the lowest wages legally permissible. Amazon appears to be at the leading edge of this technology revolution.
Can you elaborate on this? In which parts of Amazon? Order fulfillment? IT?
"cool opportunity"
what a time to be alive
Also, to the extent that Trump was elected because of economic factors rather than social factors, a cultural reaction against the rampant libertinism of late-stage liberalism, it was because their jobs were not automated but exported overseas. If their jobs hadn't been exported en masse, they would have been largely protected from automation for the last 30 years and until 10 to 20 years from now when things really get serious.
When we have the technology to meet the population's needs without its involvement in production, we have something much better than wealth: we have our lives back, our time and energy, our freedom from wage slavery.
We have government for the distribution problem.
The most viscerally disturbing thing I've ever seen a human do, is wish that others be forced to expend useless, unnecessary effort to "earn" what we could just hand out.
I understand the argument about stealing person A's labor output and giving it to person B, but no individual has a legitimate moral claim on the output of a fully automated process.
Seriously? That tops eating out of a dumpster (literally, like eating unwrapped, half-eaten discards)? Or defecating in a stairwell?
> what we could just hand out
It didn't work as charity. It isn't working as redistribution through taxation. What's your proposed solution?
Neither of those things are wishing lifetimes of drudgery as a condition of survival onto your fellow human beings.
> It isn't working as redistribution through taxation
Which companies are paying taxes on their automated output comparable to what the payroll would cost?
> Neither of those things are wishing lifetimes of drudgery as a condition of survival onto your fellow human beings.
You're either not communicating your point effectively, or you don't seem to have any understanding of reality.
Who, exactly, is "wishing lifetimes of drudgery as a condition of survival onto [their] fellow human beings"?
And who, in their right mind, would willingly forego stable access to the necessities of life (food, a home...) because they find such stability intolerable compared to a lifetime of drudgery?
>> It isn't working as redistribution through taxation
> Which companies are paying taxes on their automated output comparable to what the payroll would cost?
We seem to agree that redistribution through taxation categorically does not* solve the problem of providing people with the necessities of life. So what is the point in discussing a specific aspect of taxation?
Instead, I'll ask again - what is your proposed solution, such that people's basic survival needs are accommodated, given that charity doesn't solve the problem either?
* I'm not saying that it can't. I'm saying that it doesn't - primarily because the wealthy have bought 6 decades worth of across the board, increasing tax cuts (among other things) by buying government.
50 years ago, those people, except for the absolute worst of the worst, were productive, law-abiding citizens with intact families, functional homes, and a place in the world.
When a man is made economically useless, he ceases to be a man. He becomes just another useless mouth to feed, like an animal in a zoo, but unlike the zoo animal in that people do everything in their power to avoid seeing him.
The end result is that everyone up and down the income distribution benefited from gains in efficiency. And those who were displaced had little problem finding new work because their former coworkers now had more money and/or leisure time to spend on new economic activity.
I don't need to explicate; you know exactly what they are.
P.S. 99% of the guys complaining about liberals are themselves liberals, though they're too dumb to realize it.
Main thing IMHO is that the industry uses a lot of hardware that has payback periods of decades. Nobody's going to spend money on high-end new automated gear unless they have high confidence that there's going to be enough business in the next few years/decades to pay it off. The offshore operators tend to buy in first, both because they have the capital, and because the cost and risk of keeping more people offshore is so much higher. Land operators tend to get this kind of stuff at a trickle.
The headcounts will fall, but not as much or as fast as some would have us think, both for that reason, and because this stuff is hard to get right. The project that I worked on mostly put more people on the rig just to keep all of the stuff running. There were only a handful of rigs in the field with enough automatic hardware to use our system in the first place.
One of the clever pieces of writing/directing in Deepwater Horizon was at the beginning when the daughter of the character played by Mark Wahlberg did the thing with the coke can to demonstrate how an oil well worked (or didn't).
IMO, it was a brilliant piece of non-exposition exposition, whether or not a lot of the audience really picked up on it. The basic concept was pretty important to the incidents of the movie but to explain it during the normal course of the movie would have been really tough to make seem natural. (I can't come up with a great CS example off the top of my head, but it would be like two programmers making a statement like 'You know, we have to remember that these programs are actually translated into 0s and 1s.')
For every automation story, there's one on basic income.
Yep. And hardware, and knitting together the boxes, and power, configuration management, and networking and...
If you can't do it with a pipe wrench, why it ain't worth doing :)
The problem with software there isn't the software people. It's the requirements gathering. I don't expect it can actually be resolved. You should see what passes for MRP around Houston.
I believe I first heard about the Iron Roughneck in the '80s, just in idle chatter.
Typical company: let's hire a body shop who will fly in a bunch of people who barely know English and pay them crazy bill rates to write reams of completely unreadable "specs"
Programmers cost more than pipe welders but you don't see them getting unintelligable 200 page Word documents instead of certified blueprints from an expert do you?
This is the same site that, for the most part, thinks Tesla beating out Ford/GM/Toyota/Honda/Nissan/Hyundai/Fiat/Google/Apple is a done deal.
Your statement contradicts the rest of your paragraph (that the article is naive and far fetched).
Because if this is really true, then it's only a matter of assembling a good software team, with one or two domain experts (who know the domain and are good s/w engineers), pair it up with the team of engineers and line workers, and a successful automated system can be built, i.e., exactly what the original post is talking about.
So yes the only thing standing between BACK-OFFICE people and their jobs is how bad these companies are at making software and believe me they are bad. Furthermore, out on the drill/job/construction/plant site robots are not going to be taking anyone's job tomorrow.
I don't care if it's a kryptonite for these people. My point is that if that's the problem, then automation is "technically" a solved problem! only that it has "managerial" challenges (and managerial challenges of white-elephant corporations are solved by small startups. So it may be bad news for big corporations, but it's good news for the progress of the rigging industry).
Let me break this down.
You build a company, any company, and it's core business is doing something, anything, OTHER THAN MAKING SOFTWARE. You get good at it, you get big. Internal processes and culture might be totally fucked to the individual observer but as a whole the organism is thriving in its environment. So if the company sucks at making software you can bet (that until this point) being good at software has not been critical for survival in its environment. Hell there are plenty of software companies that are horrible at making software and yet they survive because being good at making software is (for whatever reason) not required for survival in their environment (market).
So you have all these companies that are really good at pouring concrete, or not paying insurance policies, or flying airplanes, drilling for oil. They all suck at software but WHO CARES. They buy technology from companies that make it better than they could and the rest they cobble together SOMEHOW.
Now imagine you've reached peak: materials science, labor cost reduction, managerial science, globalization, etc...
You and your competitors have all outsourced, matrixed, offshored, bought, invested, borrowed, hedged, and most of all deployed the best COTS tech available for your needs.
What do you do now? How do you get an edge over your competitors? What space is left where 10x gains can happen seemingly overnight?
Software.
Companies are slowly arriving at this notion. The problem is they are these very uniquely tailored organisms and everything about their evolution seems almost tailored to suck at software. They throw immense sums of money at software projects. They hire the best firms in the business (they think) and it JUST DOESN'T WORK. Uber and AirBnB quickly gathered more respective capacity than their traditional competitors and it ALL JUST LOOKS SO EASY but these big companies with massive budgets can't make software to save their lives. Even some old software companies can't make software to save their lives.
The problem is systemic:
* Company wide HR practices are toxic to hiring good developers
* Technical ability in leaders isn't respected
* Complexity isn't fundamentally understood
* The first-principles of software are like Klingon
* Bureaucracy has an impedance mismatch with software development
I could go on and on. The only clients I've had that have a chance of overcoming this inertia have leaders starting from th CEO on down drink the Kool-aid and decide that they want to become a tech company. These folks aren't perfect but they begin to reassess everything, compare themselves to companies that are great at making software and start cargo culting everything they can find. That begins to bring about the kind of change that might make them good at software. It's ugly, but its better than the status quo. Still, they are the precious few. The rest hire "agile coaches" like me and waste my time and their money and have a "snowball's chance in hell" of ever getting good at making software.
You can't bolt software on to an organization like that. They simply do not understand, deeply and utterly. It might be willfully. Just identifying defects clearly can be quite a bit beyond some people.
But I heartily recommend that you try it. You will learn a lot about humanity.
Leadership of tech, especially disruptive tech, is SFAIK mostly half black art and half blackmail.
> That means an engineer can design an oil well at his desk. With the press of a button, an automated system would identify the equipment needed from a supplier, create a 3D model and send instructions for building it out into the field, Hashmi says. “That is automation.”
I'd be very surprised if that doesn't already exist: printing a 3D model, submitting an order for the parts, and sending the documentation to the field.
That's assuming the engineer has identified the parts and written the instructions. Automatically doing that might be more of a challenge.
Hahaha. No, let me talk you through it (assuming we are talking new technology, as opposed to a small refinement of existing stuff):
Engineer sits at his desk/wherever and has an idea for some equipment. We're at TRL 0 (following API 17N).
Engineer spends some time demonstrating and documenting how it's likely that this solution will work, possibly involving CFD and/or FEM work. We're at TRL 1.
Engineer gets a simple scale model built, and the scale model is laboratory tested to prove that the concept is likely to work. We're at TRL 2.
Engineer gets a (downscaled and/or simplified) prototype built and tested over a limited range of operating conditions. We're at TRL 3.
Engineer (but really, now we're talking the company) gets a first full scale version built, and this is tested at realistic operating conditions. TRL 4.
The full scale version is integrated with the actual system which it will be running in. TRL 5. This is basically "first deployment", and you've probably spent a few hundred thousand dollars at this point, if not much more.
Your first deployment case has run for an extended period of time under a range of real conditions. TRL 6. The solution is now proven, and can be promoted to other facilities that don't want to be the first adopter.
Your technology has run for a significant amount of time at several installations under a wide range of conditions. The technology is now proven. TRL 7.
If that's what he's talking about, I think it's possible if not already in place.
But I agree, replacing all the testing and the skills of an entire company is another matter entirely, and there is certainly a lot more to be done than was described in the comment I was talking about.
If you have a PhD on the field from a top university or can demonstrate equivalent knowledge is a good opportunity. You are encouraged to publish (if not working on confidential client data), good compensation and work/life balance - for research.
There is a big push for a lot more technology on the future rigs, driven by all the factors: environmental safety, regulations and economics. Operating on a price controlled scenario means you have to be able to quickly mobilize and demobilize assets, for this automation is also critical.
"Rigs have gotten so much more efficient that the shale industry can use about half as many as it did at the height of the boom in 2014 to suck the same amount of oil out of the ground."
I'm more familiar with mining and it's fairly amazing the productivity improvements that went into that, those jobs are never coming back.
After the pricing downturn, the number of exploratory/new wells and re-fracturing of old wells declined remarkably, so it's not like they actually 'need' as many people on the oil field. If oil goes back above, say 60$/barrel you'll start seeing more hiring/exploration in ND. Right now they can profitably pump extant wells, but new wells will wait for demand...
Does it make anyone else sad to hear this? I see posts about robots/AI/etc automating away jobs and I try to be happy about that (who wouldn't want to never have to work again?) but I guess I'm saddened by some perceived loss of interesting opportunities.
If I wanted to get my hands dirty or get away from the world for a bit, before robots I could work on an oil rig for a bit. Now, that's not really an option.
Does anyone else have this sort of thought pattern? What replaces work you find enjoyable/exciting if it's not something you can do at home or by yourself in a post-AI, post-UBI world?
These specific jobs are not economically feasible, but that opens up labor demand for new, sometimes hard to imagine jobs.
The more I read dig it, the more I don't believe in technological unemployment (i.e. a technology automates a person out of a job, and that person remains forever unemployed). Instead, recently, something seems wrong with the re-hiring process in the global economy.
Very lucid discussion (found on HN no less) here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a...
We're in the middle of an education bubble right now, and while there will always be automation-driven job disruption, whether or not the workers will be able to retrain to meet the new job demand isn't guaranteed. There's an opportunity for relatively low-cost job training, but until the University-degree title system flops, it won't be revered to be the same level of quality.
Checking my memory just now I learned something interesting: the magic lantern was invented by Huygens in the 1600s, and he probably had a simple animation in mind -- he sketched a sequence of Death removing his own head.
I always get kind of agitated at the notion of post resource scarcity because if you took someone from 1000 years ago and dropped them into today they'd be amazed at how much everyone has. If everyone had 11th century desires but 21st century technology we'd be there. But we're definitely not. I sincerely doubt we ever will be.
As for the real world you can observe demand satiation right now among different ranks of the rich. Look at billionaires. They consume much more than the man who has only a few million in the bank, but sub-linearly more. From millionaires to billionaires you don't see a thousand-fold increase in consumption as measured by house size, food, beverages, clothing, medical care... Billionaires are three orders of magnitude separated from millionaires on the basis of control, not consumption; the richest will feel ill long before they consume all the champagne or caviar they could afford to buy.
Which is why the growing wealth inequalities are bad for the overall economy. The rich can't spend their money with enough scale or velocity.
In a sandbox game like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, once I have met all the objectives built into the game, I can invent new and ridiculous objectives, such as "build a fortress entirely out of obsidian 200 z-levels high".
Once you're rich, and can no longer spend all your income on everything you can think to consume yourself, you can buy a megaproject.
Run a political campaign for PotUS. Build a working town, like Disney's Celebration, Florida. Develop a self-driving electric car. Build a city that floats on the ocean. Start a Mars colony. Build a single Dyson heliostat. Breed elephants down to the size of Great Dane dogs. Develop sono-videophones so that dolphins in zoos can talk to each other. Cure one or more types of cancer. Breed a horse that wins the triple crown. Found a religion that out-grosses Scientology and Mormons, combined. Repave all the highways in your state, and do a structural integrity assessment of all the bridges and overpasses, too. There are countless ways to spend a colossal pile of money.
How does one get control of so many resources with a finite and exhaustible amount of imagination?
As they say, "past performance is not indicative of future results".
If the ultra-rich do not spend enough, they might begin to undermine the foundations of the economy. Then, if enough people can trace the apparent cause of their suffering to the wealth inequalities, they will start killing and/or looting rich people, possibly without regard to their individual conduct.
So by all means, if you think you're strong enough, go ahead and hoard ever increasing amounts of wealth, without limit. There's a distinct likelihood that your estates will never be besieged by hordes of starving peasants, and that you or your heirs will never be kidnapped for ransom (or revenge) if you ever attempt to travel beyond your own holdings, and that you will never be shaken down by corrupt officials. The less people perceive the systems of civilization to be fair, the less apt they are to respect its rules of conduct. It only takes one pissed-off person to make your life Hell, and there are 7 billion candidates out there just waiting for you to give them a good reason.
We got from the beginning of the industrial age to now by burning coal and oil. But if we continue to do so now, it is likely to eventually make the surface of the entire planet uninhabitable, rather than just Beijing. Responsible people have therefore been shifting to more technically advanced sources--such as wind, solar, hydro, and fission--to meet their power needs. In the same way, people who have grown so rich that they could buy anything they might possibly want must alter their habits to avoid poisoning their own environment.
2) The unwashed masses will never rise up against their uhpressors;
3) Rich people don't have some magical collective which solves the collective action problem; they act in their own interests on an individual basis, just like everybody else;
4) In the current regime, wealth is not power;
5) "Less" money, "fewer" dollars; one is continuous, the other discrete;
6) Nuclear is way cool, but coal isn't going to kill the planet;
7) The rich didn't get rich by frivolously buying everything they could possibly want, they got rich by saving and investing the vast majority of dollars that ever passed through their possession.
2. History disagrees with you. Countries occasionally experience revolutions wherein the lower class murders a significant portion of the upper class (only to promote their own into the same social positions, whereupon they adopt similar behaviors). The unwashed masses may never exist long without a perfumed and shaved upper class, but they can certainly put a lot of bodies in the ground when they get the itch. For instance, look at the French Terror, or the Russian revolution, or the Khmer Rouge killing fields, or the Iranian revolution, or the Cuban revolution. Eating the rich tends to set back economic development by a decade or more, but that doesn't stop the lower classes from doing it.
3. Which is why there will be a lot of free riders on the coattails of those public figures that choose to pursue philanthropic projects. I'm sure that many of them lie about anonymously donating to charities.
4. Wealth and power are not equal, but they do have an exchange rate.
5. Thank you for the grammar reminder. Were you correcting someone upthread, or just mentioning it in case someone might get it wrong later?
6. Coal-burning won't kill the planet--it will just kill some of the humans on it, and maybe some unfortunate plants and animals that happen to live downwind or downstream from industrial zones. I still haven't forgotten the TVA Kingston ash slurry spill. I'm also inclined to believe that excessive burning of hydrocarbons for energy could trigger outgassing of polar methane clathrates, which would be an ecological disaster. It won't cause human extinction, but it will crater the global economy.
7. Is wealth a means to an end, or an end in itself? Of what use to the rest of humanity is the man who hoards without end, who fills warehouses to the brim and locks them away, never to be emptied? I don't care how the rich got rich. It doesn't matter to me whether they pulled themselves up out of the gutter by their own bootstraps, or whether they were lucky enough to be born rich. I only care about what you do with what you have.
I'm genuinely interested.
For example assume that a new billionaire is minted by a lottery with 100 million people buying a $10 dollar ticket. Long term it's neutral but in the short term it effectively removes $1B in near term consumption from the economy and spreads it out over 100+ years.
On the other side a million people will likely better invest and sound a thousand dollars than one person will invest one billion.
The effect is to concentrate economic activity in specific sectors where banks are willing to lend which means the economy is less flexible overall.
An economy with $1B of debt and $1B in savings spread over 10,000 people is going to be more diverse and resilient than 9,999 people who have $1B in debt and one person with $1B in savings invested in housing and car loans.
The best outcome would be if she invested in new equity in a company that created a positive ROI in excess of what the lottery ticket buyers would have produced. Anything else is a net negative.
This is fine so long as investments move. We have such a high degree of aggregation of capital now that it sort of doesn't. It's sort of ... pinned down in the light cast by the public markets.
Even mutual finds are just now coming of age, much less the things that were innovations on them.
If too much goes to salary than the investment stops making sense and the rich will hoard cash instead, but I don't think we're in that situation. Could that be why QE was pumping so much money into the economy with inflation staying low? I bet there are statistics about the amount of cash people and companies are hoarding now vs 50 years ago, but there's too many confounding variables for me to figure it out.
Minds can build robots to go mine asteroids light years away and come back through (duh) hyperspace. I meant the original comment quite literally.
Also, it is a really freaking good series if you like Sci-fi that tries to answer philosophy questions, which this series does a wonderful job of.
It's a lovely picture of the future, assuming we have a really friendly AI explosion.
(I'm sure you know all this; I'm just elaborating for those who haven't sampled the delights of Banks' novels.)
When you can move literally anywhere in the galaxy, amongst virtually any galaxy that hyperspace ships can take you to, there isn't a scarcity of space and machines can create literally anything in this world on demand, so demand is also never a problem.
I think somehow we are misunderstanding eachother, but it makes it much harder to explain this VAST ecosystem when it does appear you might not have even read the series we're all discussing.
Obviously the replacement fertility rate is going to be a lot lower in a society where people can live as long as they please and most choose centuries of life. But the Culture is also vastly wealthier than any real-life low-fertility nation. There's perfect birth control for both sexes and a general absence of destructive impulses among biological Culture citizens (due either to selection pressures or editing). I'd guess that the Minds don't need to nudge much if at all.
Having advanced that argument, I wonder if there is any consistent relationship between material prosperity and fertility. Would a weakly post-scarcity society[2] have higher or lower fertility rates than rich nations do today? There'd be none of the security-in-old-age pressures that drive high fertility in poor nations, but also none of the economic penalties to child rearing that discourage high fertility among the educated middle class in current developed economies.
[1] Ranked by nominal GDP per capita.
[2] A fully robotized productive economy, but we can't just gin up atoms and energy like in the fictional Culture. Also no FTL or teleportation. Real physics only. It's the Silver Plan of post-scarcity, as compared to the Culture's Unobtainium Plan.
The Culture is not limited to biological rates of reproduction. That nobody ever sets off a human forkbomb is a collective choice, somehow.
(Sketchy reply because I'm on a tablet.)
We always seem to want more "stuff" for some reason. Without some changes in the way we think and feel, we may never reach true post-scarcity.
For example, air is currently a post scarcity good.
You don't pay for the air you breath. But do spend your day trying to collect more and more air? No. Because you can have as much air as you want.
It is not a requirement per se for you to survive in those environments, but boy does it feel good to get some O2 if you don't have enough red blood cells in your veins to get the oxygen your body needs to feel comfortable.
The same is true, IIRC, in Beijing, where clean air can be hard to come by.
I suppose the only reason we don't usually experience air scarcity is because the ecosystem services of earth do a really good job providing it.
It's easy to imagine this not being the case. There is clean air scarcity in polluted cities, and of course in some space environments, air might be considered quite valuable and "hoarded".
Water scarcity and water use rights are totally a thing though.
The "air market" is effectively post scarcity for most people (baring the exceptions that you mentioned).
Other markets will become similar to the "air market" when we get really good at producing those things as well.
I actually really enjoyed Use of Weapons and think Player of Games (the ending at least) might be one of my all time top 5 favorite books I've read. Brilliant stuff, keep reading it!
The real cost isn't in the work itself imo, but in the contract those people had with society, which now needs to be renegotiated, and the workers are at a substantial disadvantage this time.
There is plenty of science and engineering jobs tat let you do both.
I think that to associate automation with what is ultimately a shrinkage of the GdP is a serious, although easy, misrepresantation. Those jobs are lost, but money is saved for a part of the population, which will spend it, and ultimately create a demand for new jobs. So it's not just "jobs lost".
Now this transition of course happens in the long term, and that's the problem, but it's different from interpreting automation as net loss.
edit: turns out there is a name for this, which is the "Lump of labour fallacy"; of course, as written, the transition does represent a problem.
The money mostly goes to the capital-owning class, i.e. the established rich, who spend relatively little of their incomes. They tend to buy high-quality items with a high purchase price and a low total cost of ownership (Terry Pratchett has an interesting passage on boots), and once you've got enough income you just can't spend it all -- so they spend a much smaller percentage of their incomes on job-producing things than the poor. (Here, "the poor" includes the middle class and noveaux-riches, who tend to squander money on mortgages -- and on gaudy short-lived consumer goods, like Teslas).
The rich tend to reinvest money instead of spending it, and typically live well within their means. It's not a bad way to live, as an individual (although you need some self-control and relatively modest tastes); but it has problems when most income goes to people who live this way. A lot of money ends up chasing few investment opportunities -- a situation that should sound familiar from the financial news.
In a free (and not colluded) market, end prices will go down. Profits will depend on the market, not differently from the effects of economies of scale in general.
> The rich tend to reinvest money instead of spending it
Investing money and spending it is practically the same, from the perspective of the economy.
It's also no longer an option to go work for the King's Master Blacksmith making armor for the Knights of the round table, but if that sort of thing tickles your fancy, you may be able to make do with setting up a small anvil and furnace in your garage.
For myself I fall in the optimists camp: technology does destroy some jobs, but it opens up many more.
1) The smaller the company, the more agile/nimble you are forced to be out of pure need (no money or resources), this means you have to look at automating things in order to just get you're job done. Because if you dont, you end up working 24/7 because you are the only one there to do it. Just like a start-up.
2) The bigger the company, the less agile/nimble, more bureaucracy/politics and people, the same driver is just not there anymore, so the focus on automation isn't as intense.
3) The contractor/service companies (Halliburton, Schlumberger, BakerHughes/GE, Transocean, Nabors etc..) are probably the only ones in the industry that could successfully develop and use these types of automation technologies, because it would make their services cheaper for them, NOT make it cheaper for the oil companies.
4) The big oil companies have the money, but they simply don't have the ability to effectively produce/innovate internally as a smaller company would.Hence the only way they would adopt anysort of automation tech, would be as a service, even then it wouldn't quiet match up with their own internal business needs as the company just isn't wired to think that way.
5) Currently, the buzzword/hype vortex within big oil is all BigData/Cloud/Automation/AI etc.., but is sadly used internally to blind higher ups to approve internal projects that really aren't much more than a hobbled together mess of ancient tech.
So from my perspective, automation will eventually get there in oil/gas, but it will take a glacial pace for it to happen for the oil companies themselves, but once it eventually get's there, that's when you will see the major watershed "automation" changes in the industry.
> The contractor/service companies (Halliburton, Schlumberger, BakerHughes/GE, Transocean, Nabors etc..) are probably the only ones in the industry that could successfully develop and use these types of automation technologies
> The big oil companies ... simply don't have the ability to effectively produce/innovate internally as a smaller company would.
Aren't the contractor/service companies large? Why are they more innovative than big oil?
Oil Companies think large and long term (10-50 yr cycles), meaning their payback/revenue period is also longer, and as a result their business strategy/forecasting is longer.
The cycle usually starts with a lot of upfront Capital to build up the capability to find/drill/produce/refine/sell the oil.
Once they have that capability, then the focus is on producing oil in the cheapest most efficient way possible over the 10-50 yr life of the oil field.
Compare this to the services/contractor companies, whose work is mainly fixed/short-term contract based, as a result their business strategy forecasting is alot shorter. It is also more competitive, so they have to constantly think up new and better services to provide the oil companies, while also trying to reduce their own operating expense to extract as much margin as possible.
So being smaller, with shorter business cycles, and more focus on doing things better, smarter, cheaper, the result is that the service/contractor companies really have more opportunity and an inherent need to innovate, simply as a way to survive and make profit.
1) Downhole Telemetry Systems (Communication for Downhole tools) - using EM, Fixed Wire in Drill Pipe and Mud Pulses (Pressure changes in Mud) http://www.halliburton.com/en-US/ps/sperry/drilling/telemetr... http://www.slb.com/services/drilling/mwd_lwd/mwd/powerpulse....
2) Point the Bit/Push the bit/Rotary Steerable Systems - ability to remotely point the drill bit in a desired direction http://www.halliburton.com/en-US/ps/sperry/drilling/directio... http://www.slb.com/services/drilling/drilling_services_syste...
3) Loggin While Drilling Technology - having inbuilt sensors of various types on the drill bit, collecting/sampling while drilling http://www.halliburton.com/en-US/ps/sperry/drilling/lwd.page... http://www.slb.com/services/drilling/mwd_lwd.aspx
He used to tell me stories about how close shit would hit the fan because people became used to machines making decisions that they became a lot more lax - so companies even back then were trying their best to get rid of humans for such jobs.
That said, the most manpower needed is during the initial phase, after which you could safely run with almost half the crew.
It usually takes far fewer people to oversee automation than to do the original work though.
And it only takes one machine mistake that's 10000 to reverse it again. What it comes down to is that until every mistake that can happen is known and accounted for, a human somewhere in the process will allow for better reasoning about any possible mistakes. Human errors are more likely, but they are fairly well understood and you can safeguard yourself by putting more people higher up the stack checking things. This is well understood, we've had centuries (if not millennia, depending on how you want to qualify it) to work on the problem of reducing errors in people's work.
> Many systems in oil refineries are automated because humans didn't want to shut the plant down where there was some trouble.
That's not a problem with people, that's a problem with the structure the people are in. When keeping the operation running is prioritized over fixing problems as they are found, you get a perverse incentive structure. A good example of this is shown in the NUMMI episode[1] of This American Life. In the 1980's at the NUMMI plant, GM never wanted the assembly line stopped, so cars would go through not completely finished, and then workers would volunteer to finish them on the lot manually (for extra money), but theyse cars often had problems and were very low quality. This is contrasted with what the GM execs saw at a Toyota plant (and tries to institute), which was that any problems on the line were encouraged to stop or slow the line and managers would then go investigate and either fix problems with that station, or allocate more resources there if it wasn't sufficient. The problem you outline is not inherent to the people working, the problem is the structure they are working within. The main difference in reality is that when an automated component isn't working right, people know it (or something associated with it, such as a feeder) needs to be fixed, so they fix it. Or more appropriately, they've been trained that this is the correct course of action. The same could be true of people working, it just often wasn't.
1: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/...
This doesn't sound true to me. The worst man-made catastrophes seem to frequently involve a human manually disabling some sort of critical safety mechanism (eg, Chernobyl). You could look at the checklist as a primitive form of automation that helps precisely because it removes human judgement.
In theory, automation could encompass the knowledge of the finest experts in the field. Humans get credit for being able to think flexibly and accommodate information that maybe wasn't included in the original programming. But if you're experiencing a six-sigma event that the system wasn't programmed for, what is the chance that Joe Random Operator (completed a two-month training certificate program) is going to be savvy enough to respond better?
But again, we're back to perverse incentives. Keeping the plant running was more important than diagnosing and fixing any problems. If the people involved were first assessed by how well they found and fixed problems, and then by how much uptime the plant had, I'm confident it would have played out quite differently.
There is a point to what you're saying though, and how it interacts with my statement. Humans work based on current incentives, while machines work towards the goals their designers were incentivized towards at the time of their creation. Keeping the former in good order over time is a harder task than making sure the latter is correct at design time. That is, it's easy in the design process to emphasize the cost of errors and try to account for them, but humans managers, being more dynamic, sometimes allow perverse incentives to change how a human workforce behaves accidentally. Human workers are more versatile, but that versatile comes with downsides.
> In theory, automation could encompass the knowledge of the finest experts in the field
Which is why I qualified my statement with "until every mistake that can happen is known and accounted for" and "allow for". The point is, how many machines are operating in an environment where that's true, and we're actually utilizing the information from all the experts correctly? Just taking into consideration that the physical environments where machines run is often not fully under control, I think it's actually rather small.
Sure, and I don't dispute that things like this happen. I'm just saying that the real problem here is "the company wanted maximum profit - which meant shutdown production when things failed, but continue until then" portion. Automation often doesn't allow this, not by design, but because it just can't, because it's not versatile enough to work around it's fairly narrow programming. Humans can, and when they do and then there's a major failure, that's not a problem of the human workers, or even entirely the problem of middle management, but of the overall policies and incentives that allow or promote such behavior.
That is, automation is better at reducing errors, but I also think a lot (but not all!) of what we attribute to automation reducing errors is also just their inflexibility not allowing managers to go for short-term goals at the expense of long-term goals. It's like a car that refuses to drive more than 5 miles without needing to shut down for a couple minutes after it's been 3,200 (for some leeway) miles since the last oil change. It would force people to get oil changes more regularls, and while it would cost a little more for those that put it off far longer than they should (me), it saves money in the long run through the problems it prevents (and gets detected early be people looking under the hood). That doesn't mean people can't make sure to change it on time without that extra problem, it's just that we're generally pretty bad at quantifying risk, especially over longer time scales. That problem is mitigated somewhat by multiple people and a policy, so it's not a personal decision, which is why I think companies can do much better with humans as workers than they generally currently do, even if automation in the end yield less errors (but at the cost of flexibility in the system).
I imagine there's specialized training involved to make sure that the person monitoring the machine understands the nature of how the machine operates in order to service it and know when it's making mistakes.
I wonder if the people monitoring the machines are the same ones that are being automated out of jobs or if it's an entirely different skill set?
I guess since the focus of the article was the effect on related labor and not on the technology itself, a picture was deemed irrelevant. But when the title leads with 'Robots...' I want to see a picture of a robot.
You may ask why I can't just google them, but alas, I am too lazy to google for the robot in question.
This seems to be the sales pitch for an unautomated version that seems to give a good feel for what's going on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBPiszqZnz4
This looks to be one of the more automated versions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D4F3Vo4nzM
And this one of the more manual processes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqLALzUft8Y
Very informative videos.
This is the specific device they talked about, the "Iron Roughneck":
https://www.nov.com/Segments/Rig_Systems/Offshore/Iron_Rough...
As you can see, it looks nothing like what you probably imagined - but if you've seen the manual process performed before (a dangerous and hard job, btw), you probably can understand (somewhat) how this machine works.
I have a family member who was a tool pusher for a number of years. These jobs pay a lot because there's a lot of risk, a lot of pain and a real need to retire/transition early because of the damage to your body.
If this is true then as a general rule automation is going to target jobs of highly payed, semi-skilled workers. I think we can expect that these positions will become scarcer and scarcer as automation technologies are adopted.
One area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is longshoremen (dock workers). I suspect that in the near future we'll be seeing these jobs disappear as well.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-do...
I'm not even sure that this stops at web development.
It's my general feeling that in all software there's a small core of very talented developers that are pushing the boundaries of the technology and an army of semi-skilled developers that are building off of their labors and backfilling functionality using the patterns established by the leading developers. (Most notably in the "quality assurance" teams of some large software firms.)
Over time I expect that artificial intelligence and more intelligent tooling will eliminate many of these "backfill" positions. I'm not sure what happens when this occurs as it would seem that survival of the fittest might leave many software developers unemployable (myself included).
WYSIWIG dev tools are pretty much the end point to this, but they never let you connect to data, so maybe Tableu is essentially the WYSIWIG for now.
I'm not sure how to feel about the increasing use of automation.
As a technologist I know that technology tends to increase efficiency and to some extent productivity which could allow us to scale up to projects of a magnitude never seen before in human history. (SpaceX's mission to colonize Mars comes to mind.)
As a human being I feel wholeheartedly for the people being displaced by the technology and the chaos it wreaks on their lives. I can imagine many of them may not be capable of adapting to this trend and will become completely marginalized in the workforce - relegated to having multiple low paying jobs.
There just isn't a realistic mechanism to enforce this sort of rule.
As long as Oil is above $60/barrel, the the Alberta Oil Sands become exploitable, requiring massive, massive jobs. And very high paying. Unskilled labour is $80K. Skilled labour well above $100K - and tons of 'vacation' - usually 2 weeks in, 1 week out type thing. People fly in from all over the world.
The carbon energy sector continues to employ a lot of people and will.
Of course - environmental issues notwithstanding.
It won't add jobs the way it used to. About 7/8 of the people who would've received calls in the next upswing won't if the numbers in the article hold.
Until peak oil of course - at some point we run out of okay places to drill wells. (the great places ran out before 1910, we have been moving down since) Once the geologists run out of useful places to drill something else needs to be in place to replace oil.
You can make a ton of money for a couple of years, but it wears on people and usually they want out.
That said, even a good plumber in SF should be able to earn some pretty good coin only working 8 hours a day ...
That said, it was also interesting that the basic mechanics of drilling an offshore well weren't really all that different from what I was used to.
If such a development were to occur, of course, I personally would be in favor of environmentally conscious regulations.
The offshore leases are expensive, but in the economic models they are not the primary driver of costs associated with the project. Same goes for onshore, but with less cost for the land rights and fewer regulatory hurdles.
https://www.ihs.com/products/oil-gas-drilling-rigs-offshore-...
https://rigdata.com/rigdata-insights/blogpost?BlogName=plumm...
Especially given the prevalence of "safe districts" where one party has very solid footing, it seems hard to believe that campaign funding is all that important.
I am sure robots will replace a lot of these jobs, but I don't see this article providing much evidence that it is happening substantially.
http://www.otterwoodcapital.com/static/media/uploads/2016/03...