With all this tech around, I realize that putting up a few solar pannels is so much easier and safer.
Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
91–100 of 177 posts
Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
#923 Years and half the workers: "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.
>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…
> 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.
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.
Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm guessing you're being downvoted because you've advanced a notion that goes across the grain of tech industry orthodoxy that is not supported by anecdotal observation from a position of privilege in the tech industry. A quick scan of labor statistics backs your claim however.
Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
#94Where 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…
>Drilling rigs don't suck oil out of the ground, they drill a hole...
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.')
Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
"5,000 jobs could be replaced"
"cool opportunity"
what a time to be alive
Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
#96Earlier 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…
We are already there in other sectors. I have worked in Workforce Management and Optimization (WFM/WFO) for the past few years. Scheduling is already common in areas where demand can be easily captured, for example retail banking and contact centers. We use the past data plus other "stuff" to determine the given workload for a position/activity and then schedule employees based on several factors among them are min/max hours, availability, competency, and proficiency. We even have algorithms that determine when you should hire or fire people based on workload.
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.
Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
I started to type out about how those investments need to eventually end up as a product on the shelf (metaphorically, B2B counts) to keep the supply/demand cycle going, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The money should end up as either all salary, or some salary and some product, but the salary gets spent so the supply/demand wheel keeps spinning.
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.
Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why is it a poor counter-example? I thought it was a pretty good observation.
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.
Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
#99Where 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…
This is typical HN clickbait automation porn. I always complain about it and just get censored like this comment will. Some programmers and tech people unfortunately get some kind of sick satisfaction thinking(incorrectly) that blue collar labor will be automated away with physical robots before white collar workers are automated away via software.
Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs
#100Earlier 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 is true post scarcity in that Humans invented benevolent artificial intelligence they deemed sentient called "minds". 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.
I've found the series to be incredibly uplifting as in it makes me feel positive. Sort of like ST:TNG, though with less holes (ST never really explains why so much stuff is so limited, beyond hand-wavy "energy" concerns).
It's a lovely picture of the future, assuming we have a really friendly AI explosion.