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Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

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Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#121

Post by ArkyBeagle »

ghurtado wrote: post #92
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…

> 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.

Farriers make excellent money.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#122

Post by edblarney »

lacampbell wrote: post #112
edblarney wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the price of oil rises, it makes more sense for extraction in 'hard to get' places, which requires more technology, more jobs. As long as Oil is above $60/barrel, the the Alberta Oil Sands become exploitable, requiring massive, massive jobs. And very high paying. Unskilled labour is $80K. Skilled labour well above $100K - and tons of 'vacation' - usually 2 weeks in, 1 week out type thing. People fly in from all ov…

A pang of regret for choosing to get into software instead of a skilled trade. I'd love 3 weeks in, 1 week out.

Yeah, it's not so fun. You're in the middle of nowhere, usually work 10 hours a day. The 'basics' are well done: more food that you can possibly eat, maids, cooks, but you're basically spending your life in a 'work camp' type thing.

You can make a ton of money for a couple of years, but it wears on people and usually they want out.

That said, even a good plumber in SF should be able to earn some pretty good coin only working 8 hours a day ...

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#123

Post by ArkyBeagle »

cr0sh wrote: post #108
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…

FWIW, I almost guarantee you the justification for this is safety. That's the best kind of automation.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#124

Post by kbenson »

bluGill wrote: post #109
kbenson wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 som…

> In the case I'm thinking of the company wanted maximum profit - which meant shutdown production when things failed

Sure, and I don't dispute that things like this happen. I'm just saying that the real problem here is "the company wanted maximum profit - which meant shutdown production when things failed, but continue until then" portion. Automation often doesn't allow this, not by design, but because it just can't, because it's not versatile enough to work around it's fairly narrow programming. Humans can, and when they do and then there's a major failure, that's not a problem of the human workers, or even entirely the problem of middle management, but of the overall policies and incentives that allow or promote such behavior.

That is, automation is better at reducing errors, but I also think a lot (but not all!) of what we attribute to automation reducing errors is also just their inflexibility not allowing managers to go for short-term goals at the expense of long-term goals. It's like a car that refuses to drive more than 5 miles without needing to shut down for a couple minutes after it's been 3,200 (for some leeway) miles since the last oil change. It would force people to get oil changes more regularls, and while it would cost a little more for those that put it off far longer than they should (me), it saves money in the long run through the problems it prevents (and gets detected early be people looking under the hood). That doesn't mean people can't make sure to change it on time without that extra problem, it's just that we're generally pretty bad at quantifying risk, especially over longer time scales. That problem is mitigated somewhat by multiple people and a policy, so it's not a personal decision, which is why I think companies can do much better with humans as workers than they generally currently do, even if automation in the end yield less errors (but at the cost of flexibility in the system).

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#125

Post by arjie »

ceedan wrote: post #95
manglav wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why even would someone against that be on HN? It's a place where people interested in startups are. Automating jobs away is always seen as a fantastic opportunity here.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#126

Post by ArkyBeagle »

msandford wrote: post #44
SEJeff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do consider reading the entirety of Ian M Banks's Culture Series. It is some fantastic Scifi that literally explores humanity in a post resource scarcity world.

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…

Tyler Cowen's "The Complacent Class" seems to paint a picture of satiety. I haven't gotten my copy yet so perhaps I missed something. We may get stuck at 1990s desires, except for experience ( and consumption and experience don't share a lot of Venn diagram ).

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#127

Post by slv77 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #87
mccoyspace wrote: post #83

Earlier 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.

Depends on how it was earned and invested.

For example assume that a new billionaire is minted by a lottery with 100 million people buying a $10 dollar ticket. Long term it's neutral but in the short term it effectively removes $1B in near term consumption from the economy and spreads it out over 100+ years.

On the other side a million people will likely better invest and sound a thousand dollars than one person will invest one billion.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#128

Post by ArkyBeagle »

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…

Most of the processes and governance on assets held by billionaires is on rails. They may have control at a very high level, but they then have to become public figures to increase that. Most billion dollar things are really 100 10,000,000 things aggregated - the way to a billion ( outside the option lottery ) is to do M&A to grow.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#129

Post by prawn »

whyileft wrote: post #99
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…

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.

I think that's unfair. I think many of us read and submit stories like this because the changes hitting society are fascinating, not because we delight in people losing their livelihood.

For every automation story, there's one on basic income.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#130

Post by giggidygig »

Having worked in the industry for 10+ years now, first on deepwater oil rigs (drilling), now working IT for a large oil company, some things i've observed/experienced first hand which could provide some color to the automation side of things:

1) The smaller the company, the more agile/nimble you are forced to be out of pure need (no money or resources), this means you have to look at automating things in order to just get you're job done. Because if you dont, you end up working 24/7 because you are the only one there to do it. Just like a start-up.

2) The bigger the company, the less agile/nimble, more bureaucracy/politics and people, the same driver is just not there anymore, so the focus on automation isn't as intense.

3) The contractor/service companies (Halliburton, Schlumberger, BakerHughes/GE, Transocean, Nabors etc..) are probably the only ones in the industry that could successfully develop and use these types of automation technologies, because it would make their services cheaper for them, NOT make it cheaper for the oil companies.

4) The big oil companies have the money, but they simply don't have the ability to effectively produce/innovate internally as a smaller company would.Hence the only way they would adopt anysort of automation tech, would be as a service, even then it wouldn't quiet match up with their own internal business needs as the company just isn't wired to think that way.

5) Currently, the buzzword/hype vortex within big oil is all BigData/Cloud/Automation/AI etc.., but is sadly used internally to blind higher ups to approve internal projects that really aren't much more than a hobbled together mess of ancient tech.

So from my perspective, automation will eventually get there in oil/gas, but it will take a glacial pace for it to happen for the oil companies themselves, but once it eventually get's there, that's when you will see the major watershed "automation" changes in the industry.

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