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posted by martyb on Sunday January 01 2017, @01:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-the-livelong-day dept.

Mining companies are rolling out autonomous trucks, drills, and trains, which will boost efficiency but also reduce the need for human employees.

Each of these trucks is the size of a small two-story house. None has a driver or anyone else on board.

Mining company Rio Tinto has 73 of these titans hauling iron ore 24 hours a day at four mines in Australia's Mars-red northwest corner. At this one, known as West Angelas, the vehicles work alongside robotic rock drilling rigs. The company is also upgrading the locomotives that haul ore hundreds of miles to port—the upgrades will allow the trains to drive themselves, and be loaded and unloaded automatically.

Rio Tinto intends its automated operations in Australia to preview a more efficient future for all of its mines—one that will also reduce the need for human miners. The rising capabilities and falling costs of robotics technology are allowing mining and oil companies to reimagine the dirty, dangerous business of getting resources out of the ground.

BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining company, is also deploying driverless trucks and drills on iron ore mines in Australia. Suncor, Canada's largest oil company, has begun testing driverless trucks on oil sands fields in Alberta.

The article notes that Caterpillar has autonomous machines in production, as well.

Now all they need are siege tanks and the Zerg are done for.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 01 2017, @05:09PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday January 01 2017, @05:09PM (#448176)

    The way to stick it to the golden man is to not care about gold anymore.

    If we can democratize the robots, get them growing our food and building our shelter, harvesting energy and providing clean water, at a price point where we no longer need the gold - that will be the start of a revolution. Land in the boonies will suddenly shoot up in value and the cities will become the domain of the wage slaves.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @06:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @06:42PM (#448202)

    If we can democratize the robots, get them growing our food and building our shelter, harvesting energy and providing clean water, at a price point where we no longer need the gold - that will be the start of a revolution.

    Yep. And in a lot of ways, it's really appealing (especially to someone like me, who thinks western society never quite found its footing after the industrial revolution) -- the death of wage-slavery, the return of agrarian homesteading, only with technology reducing labor requirements dramatically. It's about the closest thing to utopia I can imagine.

    Land in the boonies will suddenly shoot up in value

    And that's the end of the revolution, courtesy of property taxes, and the need for enough income to pay them every year. (Just because you don't care about gold doesn't mean the state doesn't.) Many, if not most, people could make enough money to cover current rural property taxes by some form of self-employment, if all the other bills were eliminated by busy robots. But the moment this becomes practical for a large chunk of the population, property values explode, and most of the early adopters have to move back to the city and get a job to pay their huge tax bill. (And for people who actually lived there for decades, working normal rural jobs and making enough to get by? They won't be hit as hard; when your only bill doubles, you go bankrupt, but when one of a dozen bills doubles, you tighten your belt and pray. But some that were already close to the edge will lose their homes over this.)

    It would be nice to say property taxes would just be reduced to keep revenue nearly constant (some increase to deal with the increased government services required by higher population), and eventually eliminated as robots take over the services currently provided by government. But at least in my part of the midwest, county governments are perpetually hard up for cash, and would use any means necessary to put off any tax relief until they could pay off their bills and restore their "rainy-day funds". And once you start postponing it, not only does even one year's delay risk bankrupting people, it also becomes easy to get used to the extra funds, and keep postponing it -- there's always a new high school that needs building, or some such justification.

    Like I said -- I love that vision of the future, and I hope we can find a way to make it work. But if it happens under anything remotely resembling current tax structures, it's going to be an incredibly painful process to find that way.

    (For all the folly of the "micronation" crowd, could this be the one idea where adding "on a boat in international waters" actually makes sense? Can a barge hold a solar desalination plant and enough automated greenhouse space to support one person? a small family even? I guess I have some research to do...)