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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Is this a scenario where offshore operators doing remote equipment control would be 90% as good as a US union worker for 15% of the price and could work in shifts 24/7 (e.g. for mining operations)? Sensor + control data would be great training for future AI.

Jumping straight to autonomous operations seems expensive/hard.

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The hard part with remote and automation is you often are in mud. Local humans are still much better able to run the edge of getting stuck. and if you do get stuck local help is needed to get unstuck.

There’s a startup not far from me working on remotely operated construction machines. They explicitly are targeting terrestrial as well as space operations, but I would be curious if the communication latency to any reasonably close celestial object would require autonomous operation.

This is interesting, I've been thinking about similar stuff. Can you share the name of the startup?

Carbon Origins.

I'm assuming for stuff like mining and oil fields most of the cost is having people on site to service the equipment, not just operating the equipment. You need the robot that can service the other robots, and then the robot that can service itself.

I was thinking the same thing but the cost of an equipment operator isn't that significant compared to the expense of running and especially maintaining these machines, and if teleop incurs more maintenance cost or efficiency loss due to clumsier operation, it's definitely a step in the wrong direction financially.

Genius transition plan

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