Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 177 posts

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#71

Post by manglav »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #66
shiftpgdn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly the media still likes to portray Houston as a town where everyone wears cowboy hats and that oil comes out of the ground Jed Clampett style. 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…

> 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", an…

Any suggestions on this quick programming? I'm a ChemE turned programmer, it would be a cool opportunity to explore. Feel free to email me, username @ gmail.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#73

Post by fcanesin »

I work at Schlumberger-Doll Research, a 5 storey building by the side of MIT, it is the main research center of Schlumberger Oil Services, we are currently expanding with a new Robotics department. Not only control-automation, there is applications and research to unstructured environments also.

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#74

Post by Avshalom »

bduerst wrote: post #47
ancarda wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>those jobs are never coming back 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, t…

Only if you infer the zero-sum labor fallacy. The demand for labor isn't fixed, and is influenced by the supply. These specific jobs are not economically feasible, but that opens up labor demand for new, sometimes hard to imagine jobs.

The demand that has opened up is entry level retail at or near minimum wage though.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#75

Post by fizixer »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #52

Where my Houstonians at? > "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 othe…

> The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software.

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#76

Post by neolefty »

mac01021 wrote: post #68
screwston wrote: post #5

This isn't great news for those who care about global warming, nothing drives cleaner fuel technologies better than high hydrocarbon prices.

The fewer jobs they're creating, the less pull they have with congress...

That's the useful fiction. Reality: Dollars contributed to campaigns.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#77

Post by leereeves »

fizixer wrote: post #75
ryanmarsh wrote: post #52

Where my Houstonians at? > "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 othe…

> The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software. 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…

Automation as defined by that comment is a really low bar. It probably is possible.

> 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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#78

Post by porpoisemonkey »

Gargoyle wrote: post #57
porpoisemonkey wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it the incentive to automate is to 1) reduce costs and to 2) increase quality by standardizing the execution of complicated tasks. 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…

Another area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is web developers. Whee!

> Another area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is web developers.

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).

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#79

Post by mac01021 »

neolefty wrote: post #76
mac01021 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fewer jobs they're creating, the less pull they have with congress...

That's the useful fiction. Reality: Dollars contributed to campaigns.

I've never been able to get a clear picture of how dollars translate to votes.

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#80

Post by philipkglass »

SEJeff wrote: post #61
bduerst wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. It's a nice notion to think about, but even if we could produce everything at the moment it's demanded, there is still spatial scarcity for goods and services - i.e. there are only so many ocean front homes near where my extended family lives.

Not true, think about a place where we are capable of building proper Dyson Spheres... Most "Culture series" humanoids (they're genetically modified for health reasons) live on very large artificial planets called Orbitals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(The_Culture)

Positional goods scarcity exists in the Culture for e.g. a live concert featuring a famous composer. But there is no scarcity of anything desired for functional reasons. Nobody ever has to involuntarily go without clothing, companionship, food, shelter, medical services, beverages, life-saving or recreational drugs, games, recorded media, communications, information, or life. (People can be "backed up" as recorded information and molecularly re-manufactured later even if they were vaporized in an explosion.) The Culture is the much better society that the imaginary technology of Star Trek could enable if Trek's tech were unchained from stupidity and bioconservatism.

(I'm sure you know all this; I'm just elaborating for those who haven't sampled the delights of Banks' novels.)

Post reply on HN