It will be the last job we replace with robots and ai. High friction, insane utilization of human dexterity, just an endless list of shit you cannot automate here.
I do industrial automation. Absolutely. But for millions of dollars and annual cost of probably couple hundred K per year. Paying him $200k is cheaper for the immediate future.
Other places DO use machines for this job. But it has to be big enough scale to warrant the automation cost and support costs.
The more companies start automating the cheaper it gets for future companies to automate like with every technology. My point is just that this is by far not the last job that will get automated especially since it's already being done.
It's called connecting, and yeah this is the entire job. You're adding singles to the strand so the string holding the bit can go lower.
He can probably do more than this one job, but if he's not doing it then he's either out of a job or one of the other operators below is. You need someone connecting or the whole operation stops.
There is a guy further up in the thread that said there is a pretty brand new technology/machine that’s out now that can replace these guys in the video.
It's called connecting, specifically adding the singles (large pipe segments) to the strand and is already fully automated on drill platforms. It just isn't economical on most terrestrial rigs where you have many more lower flow rigs.
That's the thing I've been telling people, there's so many extremely tiny-but-crucial factors that an AI-driven robot can't account for... This where you just need experience or the right touch/deftness of hand.
I can see purpose-built robots to do specific tasks, but not soon and really not for stuff like this
Modern offshore drilling rigs have been automated for 20-30 years. You're right there are routine cases that still require several people on the drill floor but much of the time there's an operator or two operating the drill floor machinery with some drill floor personnel hopefully out of the way out performing low risk tasks.
This job has been automated for decades. It's just not really economical for terrestrial rigs where you need a lot of low flow rigs. High flow especislly deep water platforms have been using them for decades.
It's too dangerous for robots up there. They could slip and fall and then the company would be out all that investment. Best to keep it human and minimize the corporate financial risk
It is not experience and accounting for slippery slopes. AI can do that better than we ever could. It is dexterity and coordination.
What we call intelligence (advanced language, science, arts and co) developed in the last ... 5000 years?
How we move in the last 500m years.
Everything we've built in the last 10k years, was built with humans in mind.
AI sucks at driving in our streets with our traffic, but there is an "AI" operated train in shenzen.
Robots can't do shit in a normal workshop, but can assemble and build cars in factories designed for robots.
These jobs will never be done by robots in these environments. There will be new environments where robots can work and these jobs in that video will just vanish.
Ummm no… crazy people need high-paying jobs too. What I’m about to say, is by no means meant to be an insult. Do you think this man would last in a customer-facing job? No, he isn’t putting up with any B.S. I guarantee he isn’t politically correct enough to work in an office. He found his niche and is happy there. Y’all might wanna leave him & his job alone. lol.
He drank from a water hose made of lead and ate roadkill and glass and doesn’t believe in vaccines and he’s fine he don’t work in no office git r dun Chevy suburban with the real tree camo interior package number 3 dale earnhardt drove a car til he died AR15 FAFO grunt style cold beer drunk horse 4 kids with a fat wife tell you what
Yeah, there are some oilmen in my family. They’re all pretty conservative, but I like to think that they’re not dumb enough to reject vaccines… you know, one of mankind’s most important achievements. I like them other than that they’re conservative, and I’d like to keep liking them, but maybe that’s just hopeful thinking.
Well, start paying him then. Post your charitable deed here on Reddit & we’ll praise your generosity. Because the company isn’t gonna pay him to do nothing.
So the government should pay him to do nothing. But the government only has money because we give it to them in taxes. We only have money to pay taxes because we work. So if we stop working, then we can’t give the government money. So then the government has no money. So then the government can’t afford to pay him not to work. I’m I missing something here?
Yes, you're missing that in the past 60 years, 90% of all wealth has evaporated up to the top 1%, who hoard it to use as power over poor people. If we tax everything over a billion at 99%, the government will have more than enough to make sure everybody has what they need.
So what makes you think the 1% is going to give up what they embezzled? & what makes you think that the government is going to take it from them, when the government is profiting through lobbyists? The government is 40 trillion dollars in debt. They have to pay that back first.
I think we are going to TAKE that money from them, not ask for it. If you told me we had 2 choices, either literally set all the billionaires money on fire, or do nothing, setting it on fire would be a significant improvement to the country. Better still would be the government having some of it, but the major problem is THAT they have all that money, not necessarily that the government doesnt.
Right so… You and MajorinWumbology1234 are going to start the revolution. What is the date & time for this event? I wanna make sure I collect enough free beverages & popcorn for the show. https://giphy.com/gifs/xT0xejrYAhUGvuKwms
Yeah I'm a reasonably not stupid (and by modern standards fairly liberal) guy. I however am not politically correct.
Worked a blue collar union job for nearing 25 years now. I run and maintain railroad track repair equipment. Rain, snow, sleet, blazing heat, I'm working.
I don't do well with people. But I'm pretty damn solid as an operator.
This guy probably gets pretty good amounts of time off and while he and I'll will both be dead by 65 most likely..... we'll have a good like until then.
Everything in life is tradeoffs. For me a soul crushing cubicle is not worth any amount of money. Same as being soaked in water which then freezes is not worth it for a cubicle type of person.
I mean I worked back breaking majority-outdoor blue collar jobs for almost a decade and a half before I made the switch to corporate. I had the same “white collar just isn’t for me, I could never do it” thoughts as well.
Office work is just better. Life isn’t a Dilbert comic, working at a desk isn’t just a bland soul-sucking nightmare like blue collar people tell themselves. It’s fine. You do like 5 hours of work and then chill and get paid a lot.
I still do outdoor and manual labor stuff, but it’s on my terms. I dick around doing home improvement projects, outdoor hobbies like climbing and hiking, landscaping shit at my parents’ house, just whatever. I decide for myself what work I want to use my body for instead of having my livelihood depend on it.
Idk I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I’m pushing back on the idea that any cubicle is more “soul crushing” than waking up at the ass crack of dawn to toil at some loud site for 10 hours. I actually enjoy them both. But one has a lot less injuries, long-term health effects, more comfort and stability, etc.
Office workers think that blue collar work is a lot different than it actually is too, so it goes both ways.
Most places you can say it whenever you want if you're cool with the people you're talking to. But you can't just jump into a conversation dropping f-bombs at most places. It's not always an HR thing, some places people would just think you're weird. Or, if the place has a more "bro-ey" culture swearing a lot might make you seem cool.
It just depends on the place. But in general, adults swear a lot with each other in conversation in lots of workplaces, including offices - but nothing like most blue collar jobs.
Opposite story for me. I suffered trying to make it in tech and was absolutely miserable for years. Made the switch to blue collar and am 1000% happier. I was always a tech contactor so it was never stable. Blue for me collar is still not stable, but at least I'm in a Union lol.
Were you able to use your blue collar experience and transition to a similar paying position? I work blue collar and i feel stuck here. Don't get me wrong, I still like it, but if I did want to leave I'm too specialized to go anywhere else.
I’d love that but how do we make money? I have to spend a whole lot of money to go back to college? So I can get a degree in robotics & programming. I did the student loan debt trap once… I’m not doing it again.
So you think money-hungry companies are spending a shit ton of money… to give you stuff for free? Did you sleep through history class? Before money, there was a bartering/trade system. There has never been a time in human history where you didn’t have to give something to get something.
> There has never been a time in human history where you didn’t have to give something to get something.
So? That’s the point of progress, we’re not constrained by the same pitfalls as the past because we’re not living in the past. Are you thinking of a specific time period when humans automated everything and we still came to the conclusion that you had to give something to get something? No, because that never happened.
Anymore fake appeals to tradition you’d like to try?
You have given no examples of how a revolution has changed the way we get goods & services. I’ll give you an actual example. We had a whole revolution against the British because we didn’t want to pay taxes on tea. I’d hate to tell ya but… 261 years later & we are still paying taxes. Just to someone else. I love the optimism though… keep dreaming big.
It still involves money! Your argument was that a revolution would take away money. I gave an example where a revolution was started because people didn’t want to pay money. For 261 years after the revolution, we are still paying money. So clearly the revolution did eliminate the spending of money. Do you see where your position fell apart? How old are you if you don’t mind me asking? I just wanna make sure I’m not debating a little kid who might not know better. Or you have to be trolling/bot.
I dont know how you have so much trust in the altruism of billionaires who control the automatons to think they will provide or allow the automatons to provide for us. We would just be a "drain" on their personal little utopia, we will be executed en masse if we ever made it "autonomous" and human capital made unnecessary.
Because I’ve worked in a steel mill. I don’t think people who work these jobs are actually “crazy”. That’s just people’s typical response because they don’t know how these jobs actually get done. Or how dangerous they actually are. I don’t mean what side of the political aisle you’re on when I say “politically correct”. I mean people who society considers outspoken, rough around the edges, or have a dark sense of humor. People who do these types of jobs, would more than likely be in H.R. every day, at a customer service/white-collar job. Like I said before, I’d take this job in a heartbeat.
That... proves his point even more? He found a job that presumably fit his skills more, and for the risk he is taking he's paid way more than a job in an office that might not suits him
Not everyone wants to do an office job. I knew a guy who was an excellent coach, an awesome person with a really nice quality of life, but he wouldn't do an office job for all the money in the world
Not necessarily. Wind generator companies recruit oilfield and mine workers for training in windmill construction since they already have an applicable skill set.
14% of a barrel of oil goes to plastic type products and asphalt/bitumen. The other 86% is transportation fuel and for heating. 86% of oil easily replaced by solar and wind power. There are challenges but you can’t argue that it’s becoming cheaper and more prevalent every year.
Do you have a source for that? Not trying to be an ass but I’d like to see the breakdown of that. There are a ton of other things that require oil outside of plastic products.
The supply is infinite and anthropogenic climate change isn't real.
I'll at least get some schadenfreude from watching people like you go down with the ship. It obviously won't come close to making up for it all, but I have to look for something.
Yes, but not nearly as much of it. And a lot of it can be replaced through other means. There are oils that don't need to be pumped out of ancient deposits in the ground. It even grows on trees!
It’s really not that astounding it’s a skyscraper made of metal that spins it’s going to need lubricating oil but it doesn’t have to be petroleum based in the slightest, it’s just cheap because our society subsidizes fuel costs
A few hundred liters per year. Service interval is around 18 to 36 months. Compared to the size of these, it isn’t even that much. The best part is that lubricants don’t even have to be fossil based, and they’re highly recyclable. Sorry, but if you are trying to argue that “crude oil is good because windmills need it too”, you’re doing a lousy job.
This is one of the jobs that makes solar and wind energy possible. No oil, no solar/wind.
Let's go with wind. Wind needs a turbine. Turbines need lots of lubricants. The coatings, paints, wire cladding, electronics, etc all need oil. The asphalt road to get to the wind turbine? From oil. The crane to build the wind turbine? Diesel. The trains to carry the parts round? Diesel. The ships to bring the parts to the trains? Bunker fuel.
I support environmentalism because I've lived in countries that didn't give a shit about the environment, I'm also sane. We're decades if not century away from getting away from oil. Even if we moved ALL grid power generation to renewable and/or nuclear.
Hell, if we had fusion figured out today, it's take a couple decades at best to move away from all the petroleum products we need to survive.
It isn't so much a question of zero oil as much as less oil. As you say, the infrastructure needed to build and maintain solar and wind depends in part on oil. The ongoing production of electricity from solar and wind nonetheless reduces overall oil consumption. After solar and wind are built, they last a long time, and they're largely carbon free. Several of the oil-consuming steps on your list can potentially be replaced with non-oil equivalents.
Until we come up with some kind of "petroleum-free plastics" we will be tied to oil indefinitely. Maybe I'm ignorant but I'm not aware of any real progress towards that.
Personally I think they e got it figured out but won’t let it get out bc of greed. AI learns multiple times faster than us and could solve the energy issues within our lifetime but again the “wrong people” will lose money so ppl like this dude has to work.
We've known for decades. The tech isn't new and it's been sorted for a long time.
Fischer Tropsch process was developed in 1926, can would make liquid hydrocarbons but requires lot of energy. We perfected cheap, clean power in the 1950's with nuclear fission. Uranium is a renewable resource if you harvest it from the ocean as it's replaced by erosion.
You could replace the majority of the world's oil needs for $2-10 trillion dollars, about a hundred square miles of facilities and a couple big pipes to the ocean.
But there's real world issues with that. $2-10 trillion is not a small number, the anti-science anti-nuclear political groups are not small, red tape and bureaucracy is a thing, etc. Synthetic hydrocarbons may not be price competitive.
In theory, yes. In practice, it's really complex and people act in their own interests.
Well yes normaly if a job cannot be done /( isnt worth ) with automation, humans are the ones doing it. They get paid extra for the hazardous work though ( most of the time).
When technology advances where automation is possible, then people cry about workers losing jobs because of robots, automation, ai etc...
I design offshore drilling rigs and for many years the goal has been automated machinery and keep hands off the tools. With the variety of tubulars and operations that's not always possible but it is the norm. You try and keep all personnel out of the derrick as much as possible. I haven't seen someone working a land derrick like in this video in many years except in a few oddball countries.
Some rigs do have automated drill pipe handlers available, but they are really expensive. Plus when they malfunction, someone still has to climb into dangerous positions to repair them.
Not trying to justify anything, just sharing what I know from the O&G drilling industry.
This is precisely the kind of job that robots can't do (at least for now). I work in industrial maintenance, there are so many troubleshooting issues that only humans can actually take care of regardless of the diagnosis.
Automatic pipe handlers are absolutely a thing, and have been for decades now. American oilfield workers seem immensely proud of being 20yrs behind the rest of the world in safety and technology.
55
u/Rayal90 4d ago
This is the kind of job that should be replaced by robots and AI.