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06/03/20
17:19
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Originally posted by Parsifal
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sorry I might not have been sure what you were talking about because all the mines I had anything to do with involved a shift from labour led work to machine based work. For example as I understand it block cave mining has been automated and that means not using people in the haulage process as well as the Extraction but they are still involved in setting it up. Likewise automated dump trucks that don’t need people. I am pretty sure I remember talk, when I was in the sector, of things ultimately being driven from a control room. We had started selection processes looking at fine motor skills and visual judgment, and similar, to handle the shift in skills that would happen. It wasn’t envisaged that all human interaction of involvement would be eliminated in the short term but it’s inevitable in the long term.
Safety requirements in operations add a real burden and mining has inherent risks. So automation makes sense.
in the meantime the capital outlay is significant so a whole lot of factors need to be in play to invest heavily in automation - particularly for underground operations. I don’t think they’ve yet automated every activity either. Miners can be notoriously conservative (or the exact opposite - cowboys)
maybe you were talking about the extension of all that automation to a time when humans are hardly needed at all - I just didn’t get it from what you were talking about because Vale didn’t seem to me to be much different from other mining companies. i agree that there are some interesting issues but I somehow think it’s inevitable. It’s like anything that creeps up on you. You find yourself in it with all the consequences without even realising it. After-all here we are communicating with complete strangers on things like toilet paper. That’s pretty weird - what would Queen Victoria have thought?
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I was talking about the automation where human involvement is minimal to derive as much profit and then downplay human risk. A friend was driving trucks not long ago - was a short contract but still people driving trucks in mines and being trained. There's a lot of training/medical etc., employed here. They had labour disputes going on as with the downturn only casual were put on.
There's a few books I read a while back on autonomy and autonomous weapons. I do like the autonomy in growing food though. Have seen a lot of benefits in that area.