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Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

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Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#81

Post by stale2002 »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #46
msandford wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true post-scarcity like everyone has their own mostly automated Starship Enterprise / Battlestar / Star Destroyer? 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 si…

It's a battle between supply and demand. Or, to put it in more blunt terms, between production and greed. 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.

This isnt true though.

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#82

Post by clock_tower »

pizza234 wrote: post #55
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…

>> those jobs are never coming back > Does it make anyone else sad to hear this? 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…

> money is saved for a part of the population, which will spend it

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#83

Post by mccoyspace »

philipkglass wrote: post #67
msandford wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true post-scarcity like everyone has their own mostly automated Starship Enterprise / Battlestar / Star Destroyer? 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 si…

The Culture is true post-scarcity in that basically unlimited matter and energy can be manufactured along with the objects made from matter and energy. By clever authorial fiat this doesn't lead to mega-terrorism from rare unhinged individuals, though. The real decision makers and guardians of the Culture are Minds, super-advanced AIs that can keep watch over millions of biological passengers and react to any problem…

"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."

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#84

Post by Florin_Andrei »

stale2002 wrote: post #81
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a battle between supply and demand. Or, to put it in more blunt terms, between production and greed. 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.

This isnt true though. 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.

I could not possibly think of a more poorly contrived "counterexample" than that. But perhaps it's sarcasm and the joke flew over my head - in which case have my apologies.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#85

Post by stickfigure »

kbenson wrote: post #50
bluGill wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only takes one human mistake that is 1000 to destroy all that. Many systems in oil refineries are automated because humans didn't want to shut the plant down where there was some trouble. Even when the problem is a predictable humans often refused to admit it they couldn't operate as is. (We know this pump is failing, the replacement won't arrive for 2 months though so we are going to continue as long as we can -…

> It only takes one human mistake that is 1000 to destroy all that. 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 you…

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 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?

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#86

Post by forgetsusername »

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…

>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.

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#87

Post by robotresearcher »

mccoyspace wrote: post #83
philipkglass wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Culture is true post-scarcity in that basically unlimited matter and energy can be manufactured along with the objects made from matter and energy. By clever authorial fiat this doesn't lead to mega-terrorism from rare unhinged individuals, though. The real decision makers and guardians of the Culture are Minds, super-advanced AIs that can keep watch over millions of biological passengers and react to any problem…

"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." 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.

But the money of the rich is in circulation in the form of investments. Why is retail spending better for the economy?

I'm genuinely interested.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#88

Post by XorNot »

leereeves wrote: post #77
fizixer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's not hard to imagine a search engine which matches mechanical descriptions of parts to a proposed design automatically. Just draw roughly what you need, punch in the specs, and let the expert-system provide a least-cost bill-of-materials which comes nearest the ratings + a list of custom parts.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#89

Post by ufmace »

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…

Yo! I even worked on a software project for automation once upon a time.

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#90

Post by PeterisP »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #40
gjkood wrote: post #15

Informative article, but a picture is worth a thousand words. While I appreciate the picture of a drill ship in the ocean, it would have been more informative to see a single picture of one of these robots. 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 robo…

You piqued my interest and I'm less lazy. 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

So it's less like robots doing stuff autonomously and more like larger specialized power tools that can allow 1-2 people to run a process that used to require 3-4 people.
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