> "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 other equipment... assuming the well needs to be sucked on.
The "Iron Roughneck" has been around a long time.
I would like to see all the charts in this article to go back to 2000. New drilling technology is not adopted as fast as some in SV might imagine. Wells are expensive and dangerous. Innovation is rare and new tech takes a long time to gain acceptance. I'm not saying headcount will shrink over time but this industry is cyclical and demand has been increasing and will continue too as the rest of the world develops a middle class.
> 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.”
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. The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software. Thankfully for the American worker they suck pretty bad, otherwise half the white collar jobs in the US wouldn't exist. Also, this shit is complicated AF and building a petroleum plant isn't just about the chemical process it will complete. Jesus the naiveté in this article. Oh and who designs custom well heads anymore?
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 prediction for need of replacement.
You don't have to keep 100 hands on a drilling site for the peak demand if you can effectively schedule.
> 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", and I'm like "yah but do you still see two pilots in the cockpit?".
There might be 50 extra people on a drill site but there's 5,000 in the back office whose jobs could be replaced with some quick programming and no robots.
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.
>"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"
Is that the US? The reasons I ask is because the Trump administration seems to be under the impression that they can "undo" globalization and manufacturing jobs and coal industry jobs are coming back. They seem to be intent on fixing the the former wave of job disruption instead of focusing on the next one. I'm afraid the former ship has sailed and not sure it can be fixed but at least the next one could be prepared for. And there was almost no mention of this on the campaign trail from any candidates.
Interesting Alvin Toffler who died recently and there was a discussion about him on HN talked about many of these things( disruption in post industrial society) that are coming to fruition now in his book Future Shock which was published in 1970.
Now you have a computer making sure nobody gets full time hours, schedules are different every day and change weekly making it impossible to plan a life around the job. And of course people need more than one job and the other jobs are doing the same thing.
You can see similar patterns with eLearning and performance management technology. The former decreases the cost of turnover for a firm, the latter eliminates the employee's ability to shirk which in turn frees the firm from having to offer Efficiency Wages. The firm is now able to adopt a policy of "burn 'em out and replace 'em" and offer the lowest wages legally permissible. Amazon appears to be at the leading edge of this technology revolution.
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.
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.
It's a great opportunity for those automating. I'm totally for automation as it creates wealth and I think is good for humanity in the long run, but people suffer from automation (losing jobs, homes, provision for their families) in the short term. People suffering from automation is a major reason why Trump was elected. It's highly insensitive to not be aware of the pain that is caused by automation by technologists like us.
For the most part, automation doesn't create wealth. Sometimes it dramatically improves the functionality of an operation, but mostly it just lets private enterprise replace humans with capital. Thus, it enormously increases the wealth of the owners of that capital, and moderately increases the wealth of the managers of that capital, but overall wealth is not increased, only distributed differently.
Also, to the extent that Trump was elected because of economic factors rather than social factors, a cultural reaction against the rampant libertinism of late-stage liberalism, it was because their jobs were not automated but exported overseas. If their jobs hadn't been exported en masse, they would have been largely protected from automation for the last 30 years and until 10 to 20 years from now when things really get serious.
>wealth is not increased, only distributed differently
When we have the technology to meet the population's needs without its involvement in production, we have something much better than wealth: we have our lives back, our time and energy, our freedom from wage slavery.
We have government for the distribution problem.
The most viscerally disturbing thing I've ever seen a human do, is wish that others be forced to expend useless, unnecessary effort to "earn" what we could just hand out.
I understand the argument about stealing person A's labor output and giving it to person B, but no individual has a legitimate moral claim on the output of a fully automated process.
>>That tops eating out of a dumpster (literally, like eating unwrapped, half-eaten discards)? Or defecating in a stairwell?
> Neither of those things are wishing lifetimes of drudgery as a condition of survival onto your fellow human beings.
You're either not communicating your point effectively, or you don't seem to have any understanding of reality.
Who, exactly, is "wishing lifetimes of drudgery as a condition of survival onto [their] fellow human beings"?
And who, in their right mind, would willingly forego stable access to the necessities of life (food, a home...) because they find such stability intolerable compared to a lifetime of drudgery?
>> It isn't working as redistribution through taxation
> Which companies are paying taxes on their automated output comparable to what the payroll would cost?
We seem to agree that redistribution through taxation categorically does not* solve the problem of providing people with the necessities of life. So what is the point in discussing a specific aspect of taxation?
Instead, I'll ask again - what is your proposed solution, such that people's basic survival needs are accommodated, given that charity doesn't solve the problem either?
* I'm not saying that it can't. I'm saying that it doesn't - primarily because the wealthy have bought 6 decades worth of across the board, increasing tax cuts (among other things) by buying government.
Man is an economic animal. If you want to see what purposeless leisure looks like, look at the underclass: rampant drug problems, animalistically promiscuous women, broken families, bastard, fatherless children, trash culture, and crime.
50 years ago, those people, except for the absolute worst of the worst, were productive, law-abiding citizens with intact families, functional homes, and a place in the world.
When a man is made economically useless, he ceases to be a man. He becomes just another useless mouth to feed, like an animal in a zoo, but unlike the zoo animal in that people do everything in their power to avoid seeing him.
Back when the labor movements were stronger it could be a good thing for (almost) everyone because in order to introduce new automation, management would have to offer employees something in return (high wages, benefits, shorter working hours, etc).
The end result is that everyone up and down the income distribution benefited from gains in efficiency. And those who were displaced had little problem finding new work because their former coworkers now had more money and/or leisure time to spend on new economic activity.
What libertine thing are you referring to? Equal rights for gay people, women making the same wages as men for equivalent work? I'm from a southern state, and I hear a lot of grousing about uppity women and black folks (and people don't use words as nice as that). They want revenge. That's the kind of thing that I see people complaining about liberals. And that kind of behavior is ugly and unneeded. I can think of things that appear as silly to me, like safe spaces, trigger warnings, but I've never encountered such things in real life.
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.
>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.')
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?"
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.
"...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 Houston.
I believe I first heard about the Iron Roughneck in the '80s, just in idle chatter.
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?
>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.
> 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 engineers and line workers, and a successful automated system can be built, i.e., exactly what the original post is talking about.
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.
> 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?
I don't care if it's a kryptonite for these people. My point is that if that's the problem, then automation is "technically" a solved problem! only that it has "managerial" challenges (and managerial challenges of white-elephant corporations are solved by small startups. So it may be bad news for big corporations, but it's good news for the progress of the rigging industry).
It is theoretically a solved problem, and yes, this is good news for more nimble companies. However the "managerial problem" as you call it is immense. It is almost intractable. Source: They hire me to fix the "managerial problem"
Let me break this down.
You build a company, any company, and it's core business is doing something, anything, OTHER THAN MAKING SOFTWARE. You get good at it, you get big. Internal processes and culture might be totally fucked to the individual observer but as a whole the organism is thriving in its environment. So if the company sucks at making software you can bet (that until this point) being good at software has not been critical for survival in its environment. Hell there are plenty of software companies that are horrible at making software and yet they survive because being good at making software is (for whatever reason) not required for survival in their environment (market).
So you have all these companies that are really good at pouring concrete, or not paying insurance policies, or flying airplanes, drilling for oil. They all suck at software but WHO CARES. They buy technology from companies that make it better than they could and the rest they cobble together SOMEHOW.
You and your competitors have all outsourced, matrixed, offshored, bought, invested, borrowed, hedged, and most of all deployed the best COTS tech available for your needs.
What do you do now? How do you get an edge over your competitors? What space is left where 10x gains can happen seemingly overnight?
Software.
Companies are slowly arriving at this notion. The problem is they are these very uniquely tailored organisms and everything about their evolution seems almost tailored to suck at software. They throw immense sums of money at software projects. They hire the best firms in the business (they think) and it JUST DOESN'T WORK. Uber and AirBnB quickly gathered more respective capacity than their traditional competitors and it ALL JUST LOOKS SO EASY but these big companies with massive budgets can't make software to save their lives. Even some old software companies can't make software to save their lives.
The problem is systemic:
* Company wide HR practices are toxic to hiring good developers
* Technical ability in leaders isn't respected
* Complexity isn't fundamentally understood
* The first-principles of software are like Klingon
* Bureaucracy has an impedance mismatch with software development
I could go on and on. The only clients I've had that have a chance of overcoming this inertia have leaders starting from th CEO on down drink the Kool-aid and decide that they want to become a tech company. These folks aren't perfect but they begin to reassess everything, compare themselves to companies that are great at making software and start cargo culting everything they can find. That begins to bring about the kind of change that might make them good at software. It's ugly, but its better than the status quo. Still, they are the precious few. The rest hire "agile coaches" like me and waste my time and their money and have a "snowball's chance in hell" of ever getting good at making software.
It is not a matter of assembling a team. It is a matter of corporate culture.
You can't bolt software on to an organization like that. They simply do not understand, deeply and utterly. It might be willfully. Just identifying defects clearly can be quite a bit beyond some people.
But I heartily recommend that you try it. You will learn a lot about humanity.
This. It's SO HARD to recruit good teams and even when you do projects fail because of the impedance mismatch between software development and bureaucracy.
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 3D model, submitting an order for the parts, and sending the documentation to the field.
That's assuming the engineer has identified the parts and written the instructions. Automatically doing that might be more of a challenge.
> printing a 3D model, submitting an order for the parts, and sending the documentation to the field.
Hahaha. No, let me talk you through it (assuming we are talking new technology, as opposed to a small refinement of existing stuff):
Engineer sits at his desk/wherever and has an idea for some equipment. We're at TRL 0 (following API 17N).
Engineer spends some time demonstrating and documenting how it's likely that this solution will work, possibly involving CFD and/or FEM work. We're at TRL 1.
Engineer gets a simple scale model built, and the scale model is laboratory tested to prove that the concept is likely to work. We're at TRL 2.
Engineer gets a (downscaled and/or simplified) prototype built and tested over a limited range of operating conditions. We're at TRL 3.
Engineer (but really, now we're talking the company) gets a first full scale version built, and this is tested at realistic operating conditions. TRL 4.
The full scale version is integrated with the actual system which it will be running in. TRL 5. This is basically "first deployment", and you've probably spent a few hundred thousand dollars at this point, if not much more.
Your first deployment case has run for an extended period of time under a range of real conditions. TRL 6. The solution is now proven, and can be promoted to other facilities that don't want to be the first adopter.
Your technology has run for a significant amount of time at several installations under a wide range of conditions. The technology is now proven. TRL 7.
According to the article, what I quoted is what Hashmi described when he said “That is automation.”
If that's what he's talking about, I think it's possible if not already in place.
But I agree, replacing all the testing and the skills of an entire company is another matter entirely, and there is certainly a lot more to be done than was described in the comment I was talking about.
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.
OMFG the hubris. I don't know where to start. Oil and Gas exploration and production are a Hard Problem. Visit the Offshore Technology Conference sometime.
Who is going to do provenance on the parts list? You know that all organizations that buy parts have an entire fleet of people to do this, right? It goes all the way from vendor accounting to physical inventory to finance to shipping to engineering to production to...
I work at Schlumberger-Doll Research, a 5 storey building by the side of MIT, it is the main research center of Schlumberger Oil Services, we are currently expanding with a new Robotics department. Not only control-automation, there is applications and research to unstructured environments also.
If you have a PhD on the field from a top university or can demonstrate equivalent knowledge is a good opportunity. You are encouraged to publish (if not working on confidential client data), good compensation and work/life balance - for research.
There is a big push for a lot more technology on the future rigs, driven by all the factors: environmental safety, regulations and economics. Operating on a price controlled scenario means you have to be able to quickly mobilize and demobilize assets, for this automation is also critical.
"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.
It is worth pointing out that it is the exploratory, fracturing and 'setting up' of a well that demands the most work and labor. Once they're pumping, you don't need nearly the same amount of help.
After the pricing downturn, the number of exploratory/new wells and re-fracturing of old wells declined remarkably, so it's not like they actually 'need' as many people on the oil field. If oil goes back above, say 60$/barrel you'll start seeing more hiring/exploration in ND. Right now they can profitably pump extant wells, but new wells will wait for demand...
The article is about drilling roles being reduced though, so those future wells will come with less jobs than new wells required just a few years ago (article claims 1/3 to 1/2 of jobs will not be there on new wells).
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, that's not really an option.
Does anyone else have this sort of thought pattern? What replaces work you find enjoyable/exciting if it's not something you can do at home or by yourself in a post-AI, post-UBI world?
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.
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.
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.
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).
I agree wholeheartedly, the only trick is getting those workers in a position where they can do such art projects (which are always massive money sinks in my experience)
Actually that's a pretty fun topic in tech history. You could buy short animations cheaply then, as flipbooks, and there were fancier types: viewed through a spinning cylinder, or projected. There were even 3d animations. See samples on youtube.
Checking my memory just now I learned something interesting: the magic lantern was invented by Huygens in the 1600s, and he probably had a simple animation in mind -- he sketched a sequence of Death removing his own head.
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 sincerely doubt we ever will be.
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 a million times faster than biological entities can act. All manufactured objects in the Culture beyond a certain level of complexity have their own lesser AIs embedded in them. A space suit can advise or even argue with its user; a powerful handgun will refuse to fire if it thinks its user is misbehaving. (This is a minor plot point in one of the stories where somebody destroys a ship with a very old Culture gun from before the AI safeguards were built into objects.)
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. From millionaires to billionaires you don't see a thousand-fold increase in consumption as measured by house size, food, beverages, clothing, medical care... Billionaires are three orders of magnitude separated from millionaires on the basis of control, not consumption; the richest will feel ill long before they consume all the champagne or caviar they could afford to buy.
"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.
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?
It doesn't matter how they got rich; what matters is what they need to do going forward.
As they say, "past performance is not indicative of future results".
If the ultra-rich do not spend enough, they might begin to undermine the foundations of the economy. Then, if enough people can trace the apparent cause of their suffering to the wealth inequalities, they will start killing and/or looting rich people, possibly without regard to their individual conduct.
So by all means, if you think you're strong enough, go ahead and hoard ever increasing amounts of wealth, without limit. There's a distinct likelihood that your estates will never be besieged by hordes of starving peasants, and that you or your heirs will never be kidnapped for ransom (or revenge) if you ever attempt to travel beyond your own holdings, and that you will never be shaken down by corrupt officials. The less people perceive the systems of civilization to be fair, the less apt they are to respect its rules of conduct. It only takes one pissed-off person to make your life Hell, and there are 7 billion candidates out there just waiting for you to give them a good reason.
We got from the beginning of the industrial age to now by burning coal and oil. But if we continue to do so now, it is likely to eventually make the surface of the entire planet uninhabitable, rather than just Beijing. Responsible people have therefore been shifting to more technically advanced sources--such as wind, solar, hydro, and fission--to meet their power needs. In the same way, people who have grown so rich that they could buy anything they might possibly want must alter their habits to avoid poisoning their own environment.
1) Rich people not frivolously wasting enough of their wealth doesn't undermine economies;
2) The unwashed masses will never rise up against their uhpressors;
3) Rich people don't have some magical collective which solves the collective action problem; they act in their own interests on an individual basis, just like everybody else;
4) In the current regime, wealth is not power;
5) "Less" money, "fewer" dollars; one is continuous, the other discrete;
6) Nuclear is way cool, but coal isn't going to kill the planet;
7) The rich didn't get rich by frivolously buying everything they could possibly want, they got rich by saving and investing the vast majority of dollars that ever passed through their possession.
1. Megaprojects are not necessarily frivolous. Eradicating malaria, for instance, is not frivolous; it improves the lives of every human living on this planet. Bill Gates has my gratitude for even making the attempt possible.
2. History disagrees with you. Countries occasionally experience revolutions wherein the lower class murders a significant portion of the upper class (only to promote their own into the same social positions, whereupon they adopt similar behaviors). The unwashed masses may never exist long without a perfumed and shaved upper class, but they can certainly put a lot of bodies in the ground when they get the itch. For instance, look at the French Terror, or the Russian revolution, or the Khmer Rouge killing fields, or the Iranian revolution, or the Cuban revolution. Eating the rich tends to set back economic development by a decade or more, but that doesn't stop the lower classes from doing it.
3. Which is why there will be a lot of free riders on the coattails of those public figures that choose to pursue philanthropic projects. I'm sure that many of them lie about anonymously donating to charities.
4. Wealth and power are not equal, but they do have an exchange rate.
5. Thank you for the grammar reminder. Were you correcting someone upthread, or just mentioning it in case someone might get it wrong later?
6. Coal-burning won't kill the planet--it will just kill some of the humans on it, and maybe some unfortunate plants and animals that happen to live downwind or downstream from industrial zones. I still haven't forgotten the TVA Kingston ash slurry spill. I'm also inclined to believe that excessive burning of hydrocarbons for energy could trigger outgassing of polar methane clathrates, which would be an ecological disaster. It won't cause human extinction, but it will crater the global economy.
7. Is wealth a means to an end, or an end in itself? Of what use to the rest of humanity is the man who hoards without end, who fills warehouses to the brim and locks them away, never to be emptied? I don't care how the rich got rich. It doesn't matter to me whether they pulled themselves up out of the gutter by their own bootstraps, or whether they were lucky enough to be born rich. I only care about what you do with what you have.
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.
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....
The money she collected from the lottery ultimately represent a call option on someone's future labor. After the lottery that call option has been handed to a single individual who may never make that call in her lifetime. The effect is similar to the coal mining town's company store where you can only buy what they sell at the price they set.
The effect is to concentrate economic activity in specific sectors where banks are willing to lend which means the economy is less flexible overall.
An economy with $1B of debt and $1B in savings spread over 10,000 people is going to be more diverse and resilient than 9,999 people who have $1B in debt and one person with $1B in savings invested in housing and car loans.
The best outcome would be if she invested in new equity in a company that created a positive ROI in excess of what the lottery ticket buyers would have produced. Anything else is a net negative.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Positional goods scarcity exists in the Culture for e.g. a live concert featuring a famous composer. But there is no scarcity of anything desired for functional reasons. Nobody ever has to involuntarily go without clothing, companionship, food, shelter, medical services, beverages, life-saving or recreational drugs, games, recorded media, communications, information, or life. (People can be "backed up" as recorded information and molecularly re-manufactured later even if they were vaporized in an explosion.) The Culture is the much better society that the imaginary technology of Star Trek could enable if Trek's tech were unchained from stupidity and bioconservatism.
(I'm sure you know all this; I'm just elaborating for those who haven't sampled the delights of Banks' novels.)
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.
I'm guessing you've not read the series, because the context is seemingly entirely lost on you. Culture citizens are free to go anywhere they want and do literally whatever they want. Small orbitals are ~20x the size of earth whereas large ones are 200x the size of earth. Also, you can live on planets if you wish, but the idea is seen as very quaint and generally not a very "culture" thing to do.
When you can move literally anywhere in the galaxy, amongst virtually any galaxy that hyperspace ships can take you to, there isn't a scarcity of space and machines can create literally anything in this world on demand, so demand is also never a problem.
I think somehow we are misunderstanding eachother, but it makes it much harder to explain this VAST ecosystem when it does appear you might not have even read the series we're all discussing.
It's not dwelt on much, but to make this work requires restricting production of humans. The fictional mechanism seems to be a universal sense in the Culture that reproducing at more than mildly above the replacement rate is gauche and atavistic. Presumably it's nudges from the Minds keeping us collectively in bounds.
The 20 richest countries[1] in the world are already below replacement total fertility rate. Most of the top 50 are. And even now, in a rich country like the US, about half of pregnancies are unplanned. Birth rates would drop a lot if pregnancies were only possible when both partners consciously opt in.
Obviously the replacement fertility rate is going to be a lot lower in a society where people can live as long as they please and most choose centuries of life. But the Culture is also vastly wealthier than any real-life low-fertility nation. There's perfect birth control for both sexes and a general absence of destructive impulses among biological Culture citizens (due either to selection pressures or editing). I'd guess that the Minds don't need to nudge much if at all.
Having advanced that argument, I wonder if there is any consistent relationship between material prosperity and fertility. Would a weakly post-scarcity society[2] have higher or lower fertility rates than rich nations do today? There'd be none of the security-in-old-age pressures that drive high fertility in poor nations, but also none of the economic penalties to child rearing that discourage high fertility among the educated middle class in current developed economies.
[1] Ranked by nominal GDP per capita.
[2] A fully robotized productive economy, but we can't just gin up atoms and energy like in the fictional Culture. Also no FTL or teleportation. Real physics only. It's the Silver Plan of post-scarcity, as compared to the Culture's Unobtainium Plan.
There are sects in rich countries with fertility many times replacement. They're easy to overlook because they started tiny and it's only a few generations after the demographic transition. Lower birthrates in the general population only shorten the time to the new growth mode.
The Culture is not limited to biological rates of reproduction. That nobody ever sets off a human forkbomb is a collective choice, somehow.
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 ).
If you go to places at high altitude, they literally sell compressed O2 in cans, at oxygen bars, etc.
It is not a requirement per se for you to survive in those environments, but boy does it feel good to get some O2 if you don't have enough red blood cells in your veins to get the oxygen your body needs to feel comfortable.
The same is true, IIRC, in Beijing, where clean air can be hard to come by.
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.
Consider Phlebas is like an action movie with a few parts that could be omitted entirely (the eaters of filth) and the book would be just as good. That being said, it far and above gives you a full background in the entire culture universe so the rest of the series makes much more sense.
I actually really enjoyed Use of Weapons and think Player of Games (the ending at least) might be one of my all time top 5 favorite books I've read. Brilliant stuff, keep reading it!
Those were hazardous jobs. I imagine the adventure would get old after a year.
Nothing is stopping you from getting away from the world and farming/hunting in the mountains, but it would not be economically viable (or fun after a point, I imagine).
The real cost isn't in the work itself imo, but in the contract those people had with society, which now needs to be renegotiated, and the workers are at a substantial disadvantage this time.
I have tons of lab work you can do for me if you want to get your hands dirty, your pants wet, and your skin dyed for weeks. Desk job versus hands on both have pros and cons. Luckily I'm half/half each so it makes both good and both bad.
There is plenty of science and engineering jobs tat let you do both.
>> 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 the long term, and that's the problem, but it's different from interpreting automation as net loss.
edit: turns out there is a name for this, which is the "Lump of labour fallacy"; of course, as written, the transition does represent a problem.
> 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.
> The money mostly goes to the capital-owning class
In a free (and not colluded) market, end prices will go down. Profits will depend on the market, not differently from the effects of economies of scale in general.
> The rich tend to reinvest money instead of spending it
Investing money and spending it is practically the same, from the perspective of the economy.
> 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.
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.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge of the industry. One question:
> 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
> The big oil companies ... simply don't have the ability to effectively produce/innovate internally as a smaller company would.
Aren't the contractor/service companies large? Why are they more innovative than big oil?
They are large, but not as big as the Super Major Oil Companies (Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP etc..).
Oil Companies think large and long term (10-50 yr cycles), meaning their payback/revenue period is
also longer, and as a result their business strategy/forecasting is longer.
The cycle usually starts with a lot of upfront Capital to build up the capability to find/drill/produce/refine/sell the oil.
Once they have that capability, then the focus is on producing oil in the cheapest most efficient way possible over the 10-50 yr life
of the oil field.
Compare this to the services/contractor companies, whose work is mainly fixed/short-term contract based, as a result their business
strategy forecasting is alot shorter. It is also more competitive, so they have to constantly think up new and better services
to provide the oil companies, while also trying to reduce their own operating expense to extract as much margin as possible.
So being smaller, with shorter business cycles, and more focus on doing things better, smarter, cheaper, the result is that
the service/contractor companies really have more opportunity and an inherent need to innovate, simply as a way to survive and
make profit.
Slightly off "automation" topic - but their are some pretty cool examples of service/contractor
companies using/leveraging technology to do things better ( specifically in the drilling space), which
the oil companies benefit from, but could never have developed themselves in my opinion:
A family member used to be a Safety Engineer for ONGC and ADNOC. He had visited oil rigs for quite a bit early during his career and even back (1990s) then, most modern rigs were automated.
He used to tell me stories about how close shit would hit the fan because people became used to machines making decisions that they became a lot more lax - so companies even back then were trying their best to get rid of humans for such jobs.
That said, the most manpower needed is during the initial phase, after which you could safely run with almost half the crew.
I wonder if increased automation means poorer responses to emergencies because you have fewer humans there to respond with. On the other hand, maybe it means fewer emergencies because the automation makes fewer mistakes, or makes hard jobs easier and more consistent.
Often overlooked is the type of mistake, which it seems you are touching on with "poorer responses to emergencies". If humans make 10 mistakes over a time period compared to 1 for the automated system, it might look as if the humans are worse, but if the cost of the human mistakes averages to 5 for some theoretical cost scale (so 50 overall), but the automated mistake costs 100 because there isn't a good dynamic response to it, the automated system doesn't actually cost less in the end. That's why we so often see automated systems backed by people, as we don't have automation that can respond as dynamically as a person.
It usually takes far fewer people to oversee automation than to do the original work though.
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 - once it fails we know we have 1 hour to hit the shutdown switch or the plant will explode)
> 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 yourself by putting more people higher up the stack checking things. This is well understood, we've had centuries (if not millennia, depending on how you want to qualify it) to work on the problem of reducing errors in people's work.
> Many systems in oil refineries are automated because humans didn't want to shut the plant down where there was some trouble.
That's not a problem with people, that's a problem with the structure the people are in. When keeping the operation running is prioritized over fixing problems as they are found, you get a perverse incentive structure. A good example of this is shown in the NUMMI episode[1] of This American Life. In the 1980's at the NUMMI plant, GM never wanted the assembly line stopped, so cars would go through not completely finished, and then workers would volunteer to finish them on the lot manually (for extra money), but theyse cars often had problems and were very low quality. This is contrasted with what the GM execs saw at a Toyota plant (and tries to institute), which was that any problems on the line were encouraged to stop or slow the line and managers would then go investigate and either fix problems with that station, or allocate more resources there if it wasn't sufficient. The problem you outline is not inherent to the people working, the problem is the structure they are working within. The main difference in reality is that when an automated component isn't working right, people know it (or something associated with it, such as a feeder) needs to be fixed, so they fix it. Or more appropriately, they've been trained that this is the correct course of action. The same could be true of people working, it just often wasn't.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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).
> That's why we so often see automated systems backed by people, as we don't have automation that can respond as dynamically as a person.
I imagine there's specialized training involved to make sure that the person monitoring the machine understands the nature of how the machine operates in order to service it and know when it's making mistakes.
I wonder if the people monitoring the machines are the same ones that are being automated out of jobs or if it's an entirely different skill set?
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 robot.
You may ask why I can't just google them, but alas, I am too lazy to google for the robot in question.
I think that it's not really "robots" (it's click-bait) but rather greater automation of new platforms and ships, e.g. more networked sensors instead of analog gauges, servo-controlled valves etc. Also possibly robotic drill pipe handling (i.e. a purpose-built mechanism http://www.drillingcontractor.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09... ) Maybe an underwater drone or two for inspection instead of using divers.
Thanks for the image. I coach a First Tech Challenge robotics team and seeing all the different configurations for robots doing automatable tasks gives me ideas that I can present to the team when they have to come up with designs to solve problems.
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.
Mmm - it's a continuum. This one looks like it's entirely telepresence - the only part that may be missing is the software to make it fully automatic, and perhaps some of the sensors depending on where they've hidden the control station (e.g. is some of it line-of-sight control):
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.
Tool pushing is an extraordinarily dangerous job. If it can be replaced by robotic handling equipment then good for humanity, I say.I'm honestly shocked there isn't more death on rigs...
I have a family member who was a tool pusher for a number of years. These jobs pay a lot because there's a lot of risk, a lot of pain and a real need to retire/transition early because of the damage to your body.
As I understand it the incentive to automate is to 1) reduce costs and to 2) increase quality by standardizing the execution of complicated tasks.
If this is true then as a general rule automation is going to target jobs of highly payed, semi-skilled workers. I think we can expect that these positions will become scarcer and scarcer as automation technologies are adopted.
One area where there's a glut of highly paid and semi-skilled workers is longshoremen (dock workers). I suspect that in the near future we'll be seeing these jobs disappear as well.
> 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 established by the leading developers. (Most notably in the "quality assurance" teams of some large software firms.)
Over time I expect that artificial intelligence and more intelligent tooling will eliminate many of these "backfill" positions. I'm not sure what happens when this occurs as it would seem that survival of the fittest might leave many software developers unemployable (myself included).
I'm not sure how to feel about the increasing use of automation.
As a technologist I know that technology tends to increase efficiency and to some extent productivity which could allow us to scale up to projects of a magnitude never seen before in human history. (SpaceX's mission to colonize Mars comes to mind.)
As a human being I feel wholeheartedly for the people being displaced by the technology and the chaos it wreaks on their lives. I can imagine many of them may not be capable of adapting to this trend and will become completely marginalized in the workforce - relegated to having multiple low paying jobs.
Any such "tech automation moratorium" would have to be a world-wide thing. It would not work if everyone abided by a moratorium but the US didn't or Every did but Australia --that would create an unfair advantage to the one doing all the automation where others had to pay for semi-skilled labor. There is no easy answer to the conundrum.
The other problem is how do you create the moratorium? If it's related to "how you used to do business", new companies would quickly wipe out old companies. If its by industry, new industries could wipe out old ones not because they're more efficient at their core - but because they are allowed to automate whereas other ones aren't.
There just isn't a realistic mechanism to enforce this sort of rule.
Except they were artificially high paying because of the massive risk and shit work. Human labor in such an environment was just a stop-gap solution until automation took over. These are not "good" jobs, they were high-risk gambles masquerading as jobs. This is a bit like saying that its unlikely kids who work in coal mines will find paying jobs when we outlaw kids working in coal mines.
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 over the world.
The carbon energy sector continues to employ a lot of people and will.
The math isn't the same on the actual rigs, though. The article says half as many rigs with a quarter as many people per rig to get the same amount of oil. So yeah, if we get to $60 or the heady days (I live in Houston) of $110 a barrel it'll add jobs again.
It won't add jobs the way it used to. About 7/8 of the people who would've received calls in the next upswing won't if the numbers in the article hold.
Not exactly - if oil gets that high there will be as many jobs - they will create even more wells though. What this really means is that as oil approaches $60/barrel the same number of people can drill more wells. In turn we are less likely to get over $60/barrel in the first place: as we get close more wells will be drilled which will drive the price back down.
Until peak oil of course - at some point we run out of okay places to drill wells. (the great places ran out before 1910, we have been moving down since) Once the geologists run out of useful places to drill something else needs to be in place to replace oil.
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 ...
I watched Deepwater Horizon on the plane the other day. As someone who designed systems for offshore drilling rigs in the early eighties but haven't stayed up on the tech there much, I was impressed at the amount of electronics and what appeared to be more automated handling of drill pipe.
That said, it was also interesting that the basic mechanics of drilling an offshore well weren't really all that different from what I was used to.
Kind of a tangent point but I really wonder how our society intends to solve the problem of automation replacing high paying skilled workers. Is education and relocation the only answer?
Random question, automation is inevitable without major changes to the current political/economic system (like BIG), but is one possible development is as the price of labor and setting up machines decrease, a larger number of plants/mines/drills could be opened, is this a possible development?
If such a development were to occur, of course, I personally would be in favor of environmentally conscious regulations.
I don't know much about this industry --as in I know nothing, but I think some of the costly parts are "exploration rights" as well as regulatory hurdles and costs. If you own some land with mineral rights, then you can do some of this but if you don't have land then obtaining that land and getting permission to explore is not a trivial task, I think.
No. For offshore, the major expense for the driller is in the drilling rig or drillship which can cost upwards of $1B. For the operating company, it is the dayrate that the driller charges the operator which can be from $75k/day to $450k/day. Onshore rates are <$20k/day currently for Tier 1 rigs.
The offshore leases are expensive, but in the economic models they are not the primary driver of costs associated with the project. Same goes for onshore, but with less cost for the land rights and fewer regulatory hurdles.
It was always rather transparent that the "jobs" angle was a play by big oil to stoke populism for an objectively unpopular agenda (i.e. more drilling, extraction pollution). Once automation removes the need for low skilled laborers I would think this tactic would not be available anymore (but who knows, in this era of alternative facts).
Lots of jobs in gas and oil are very highly skilled jobs. Automating the stuff that's high paying because it's risky, dirty, and far from the workers' homes will increase pay imbalances as the software developers, automation folks, sysadmins, robotics engineers, mechanical engineers, petroleum engineers, geologists, executives, et al will continue to get their pay and probably more while anyone automated away who doesn't retrain will make far less in another role.
I've never been able to get a clear picture of how dollars translate to votes.
Especially given the prevalence of "safe districts" where one party has very solid footing, it seems hard to believe that campaign funding is all that important.
Because of the direct correlation with # of rigs, the job loss will be linear with the loss of # rigs. However, the current situation is that each rig that is still working is getting more efficient and productive on a daily basis. So much so now, that there are fewer rigs coming online to produce the same amount of oil that we had before the drop in oil prices. This is where the job loss will be. Some of it is due to automation, but most of it is due to the efficiency gains in the drilling and completion process itself.
There's no real demand for new rigs right now. In the downturn, though, the rig and rig equipment companies are making more labor-efficient rigs and equipment. So when new rigs come online, they won't raise labor demand the way new rigs used to.
> "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 other equipment... assuming the well needs to be sucked on.
The "Iron Roughneck" has been around a long time.
I would like to see all the charts in this article to go back to 2000. New drilling technology is not adopted as fast as some in SV might imagine. Wells are expensive and dangerous. Innovation is rare and new tech takes a long time to gain acceptance. I'm not saying headcount will shrink over time but this industry is cyclical and demand has been increasing and will continue too as the rest of the world develops a middle class.
> 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.”
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. The limit to automation in this industry and others is, quite frankly, how bad these companies are at making software. Thankfully for the American worker they suck pretty bad, otherwise half the white collar jobs in the US wouldn't exist. Also, this shit is complicated AF and building a petroleum plant isn't just about the chemical process it will complete. Jesus the naiveté in this article. Oh and who designs custom well heads anymore?