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Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

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Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#101

Post by Eridrus »

porpoisemonkey wrote: post #78
Gargoyle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

To some extent, the idea of frameworks and open source components is pretty much automation targeting web developers.

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#102

Post by 09bjb »

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.

I'm glad someone is bringing this up. I see so many "X job getting automated, jobs are lost, oh no!" portrayed as some novel scenario where jobs are automated and no new jobs are ever made. Automation of routine jobs has been happening for thousands of years, and historically hasn't affected the unemployment rate AT ALL because new hard-tp-imagine jobs replace them.

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...

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#103

Post by stale2002 »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #98
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Exactly. I was giving an example of what post scarcity looks like.

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#104

Post by kbenson »

stickfigure wrote: post #85
kbenson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bec…

> The worst man-made catastrophes seem to frequently involve a human manually disabling some sort of critical safety mechanism (eg, Chernobyl).

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#105

Post by InitialLastName »

Avshalom wrote: post #74
bduerst wrote: post #47

Earlier 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.

And medical services: https://www.nurse.com/blog/2016/02/16/u-s-still-headed-for-n...

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#106

Post by bluGill »

ancarda wrote: post #30
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #4

3 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…

The Luddites were worried about this in the 1810s. You should look them up - there is a large amount of philosophy and debate around the topic.

For myself I fall in the optimists camp: technology does destroy some jobs, but it opens up many more.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#107

Post by robotresearcher »

czinck wrote: post #97
robotresearcher wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even cash deposits are held in banks and (a large fraction of the total held by any bank can be) loaned out into circulation.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#108

Post by cr0sh »

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 may ask why I can't just google them, but alas, I am too lazy to google for the robot in question.

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.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#109

Post by bluGill »

kbenson wrote: post #104
stickfigure wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

> The worst man-made catastrophes seem to frequently involve a human manually disabling some sort of critical safety mechanism (eg, Chernobyl). 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 i…

In the case I'm thinking of the company wanted maximum profit - which meant shutdown production when things failed, but continue until then. However there was a cowboy attitude: the operators knew that "Bubba" was almost able to to continue operation in a similar situation in the 1950s, and they think they are better. The reality is that "Bubba failed, but the catastrophic explosion was after 1 hour 20 minutes or some such thing, beating that record gives you bragging rights in the lunch room.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#110

Post by maverick_iceman »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #34
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…

This probably isn't something that appeals to the Hacker News community in general, but the first thing that comes to mind is large scale art projects, of the sort that take weeks/months to prepare (such as the big Burning Man installations).

Maybe something we can't even imagine at this point? Think about trying to explain animation to people in the late 19th century.
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