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Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

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Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#131

Post by ArkyBeagle »

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.

At one point, something like 70% of GDP was consumption. It's less now.

This is fine so long as investments move. We have such a high degree of aggregation of capital now that it sort of doesn't. It's sort of ... pinned down in the light cast by the public markets.

Even mutual finds are just now coming of age, much less the things that were innovations on them.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#132

Post by bduerst »

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)

So I have to move my entire extended family to an orbital? What if their demands aren't met there? You're missing the point about spatial scarcity and demand.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#133

Post by bduerst »

09bjb wrote: post #102
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.

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…

Yep, and to expand on that, the problem isn't technological automation, but retraining.

We're in the middle of an education bubble right now, and while there will always be automation-driven job disruption, whether or not the workers will be able to retrain to meet the new job demand isn't guaranteed. There's an opportunity for relatively low-cost job training, but until the University-degree title system flops, it won't be revered to be the same level of quality.

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#134

Post by logfromblammo »

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.

Which is something I don't really understand.

In a sandbox game like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, once I have met all the objectives built into the game, I can invent new and ridiculous objectives, such as "build a fortress entirely out of obsidian 200 z-levels high".

Once you're rich, and can no longer spend all your income on everything you can think to consume yourself, you can buy a megaproject.

Run a political campaign for PotUS. Build a working town, like Disney's Celebration, Florida. Develop a self-driving electric car. Build a city that floats on the ocean. Start a Mars colony. Build a single Dyson heliostat. Breed elephants down to the size of Great Dane dogs. Develop sono-videophones so that dolphins in zoos can talk to each other. Cure one or more types of cancer. Breed a horse that wins the triple crown. Found a religion that out-grosses Scientology and Mormons, combined. Repave all the highways in your state, and do a structural integrity assessment of all the bridges and overpasses, too. There are countless ways to spend a colossal pile of money.

How does one get control of so many resources with a finite and exhaustible amount of imagination?

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#135

Post by robotresearcher »

slv77 wrote: post #127
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.

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…

But the new billionaire doesn't stuff her mattress with ten million hundreds. She buys investments, which go back into the economy. Or she puts cash in the bank, which goes back into the economy....

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#138

Post by ryanmarsh »

ghaff wrote: post #94
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…

>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.…

Yah, just saw the movie last week. Definitely a useful "non-exposition exposition". I thought it was hilarious when everyone became a structural/petroleum engineer overnight when the well head was still spewing weeks after the incident. Everyone had a simple solution. Like when baby Jessica fell down that well in Texas. I'm like "you do realize methane hydrates crystalize at those pressures right?"

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#139

Post by ryanmarsh »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #115
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…

"...frankly, how bad these companies are at making software." Yep. And hardware, and knitting together the boxes, and power, configuration management, and networking and... If you can't do it with a pipe wrench, why it ain't worth doing :) The problem with software there isn't the software people. It's the requirements gathering. I don't expect it can actually be resolved. You should see what passes for MRP around Ho…

Totally.

Typical company: let's hire a body shop who will fly in a bunch of people who barely know English and pay them crazy bill rates to write reams of completely unreadable "specs"

Programmers cost more than pipe welders but you don't see them getting unintelligable 200 page Word documents instead of certified blueprints from an expert do you?

Re: Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs

#140

Post by ryanmarsh »

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…

You do realize that "assembling a good software team, with one or two domain experts ..., pair it up with the team of engineers and line workers)" is like kryptonite for these people right? It's impossible. I've seen them try over and over and fail. The one time I saw a client assemble a great software team with great domain experts we had project managers who wanted to rescue the project from the jaws of success. We fought back, that system went into production and the company laid off scores of high-pay office workers in Houston.

So yes the only thing standing between BACK-OFFICE people and their jobs is how bad these companies are at making software and believe me they are bad. Furthermore, out on the drill/job/construction/plant site robots are not going to be taking anyone's job tomorrow.

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