Modern truck

180224Sa Melbourne Herald Sun - ore truck.

Roderick.

Roderick.

March 7 2018 McGowan urges Rio Tinto to retrain workers
The West Australian premier is pushing for Rio Tinto to retrain the estimated 200 employees whose roles will be replaced by driverless trucks.
Rio Tinto will introduce driverless trucks to a new mine in the Pilbara region later this month, its fifth to be serviced by the expanding fleet.
A Rio Tinto CAT autonomous truck. Photo: supplied
WA Premier Mark McGowan said on Wednesday that possible job cuts were concerning for the workers involved and he would write to Rio Tinto to request employees were offered other positions.
"Rio Tinto is a big company. It operates in Western Australia mining iron ore and there's a range of jobs that it needs to be performed," he said.
"With the workforce that is displaced by these sorts of initiatives, they need to retrain them and put them into other positions in the company."
Mr McGowan said the state government would do its best to "advocate on their behalf".
"Just because there are driverless trucks doesn't mean there aren't other roles that can be performed, so we're going to take up the case on behalf of those people," he said.
A spokesman for the mining giant told AAP the company already had plans to retrain workers.
Rio Tinto iron ore chief executive Chris Salisbury addressed a business function in Perth on Wednesday but did not say how many jobs were being affected by the automated transition of the iron ore division.
The division employs 11,500 West Australians directly.
< www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/mcgowan-urges...20180307-h0x5zr.html >

180308Th Melbourne Herald Sun - driverless mine trucks.



WA Today

"March 7 2018 McGowan urges Rio Tinto to retrain workers"
Yeah, like that's going to happen! While ever business is geared towards the almighty dollar and the accumulation of massive profits for stakeholders, they are going to squeeze the workforce ever tighter.
What would they be retrained as? I.T. experts to operate the same amount of driverless vehicles, be they on the mine sites or on the highways such as are already being trialed?
Sad fact of life is that we are all becoming "surplus to requirements", only just so many of those jobs needed as well. With every second kid coming out of the colleges and uni's going into some sort of computer related employment (if they can even find it), how long until it too catches up?
Anyone who has read stuff by Orwell, Tofler and that ilk where they forecast these rapid developments of technology, would be saying to themselves that they weren't that far off the mark.
I'm not going to waffle on about immigration policy's adopted by successive governments in this country alone, don't even know what the published (and probably doctored) percentage figures are for current population.
S.E.Asia and the sub-continent countries have alarming population expansion numbers, yet they still grow unchecked to this day. And these same countries are either leading, or certainly way up there at the top with this I.T explosion. I have always believed that their politicians, or military juntas took the view that if a couple of million get wiped out in a famine or floods or natural disaster, they could always write it off by saying that it was just Mother natures way of keeping the status quo.
But, as usual, I digress. The topic was about reducing the amount of "bums on seats" to coin a phrase.
Doesn't matter what mode of transport (industry) it is, mining, transport, shipping, they have all arrived at the point where you move the largest amount of product the most efficiently, be it ore, grain, oil. And in doing so, reduce the amount of human input.
One or two things on the plus side there, human nature dictates that humans stuff things up, make errors, cost producers alarming amounts of profit. So, once initial teething problems are sorted, better to run your fleet(s) autonomously.
Sure, you will still need maintenance workers to do the servicing repairs, but you already have them on hand anyway.
Jump forward not too many years, all very well to have all these resources mined and produced, sent off to the manufacturers (another increasingly automated industry) made into goods that people buy, (whether it is really needed or not). Who's going to buy it if you haven't got any sort of income because you have been put out of work?
The government? They are not coping with the massive drain on social services as it is.
Tax the same miners/producers even more so they pick up the slack in the national debt?
Then all they do is put out a statement saying that this country has outpriced itself, shut the doors and move off shore to somewhere where the going rate for labour is a buck an hour.
I don't profess to know the answer(s), maybe old Ned (Ludd) had the right idea after all, we may be all better off if things were simpler.
Anyway, that's my rant for today, vented my spleen, probably way off the mark as usual. But up until now, that's one thing they haven't restricted us from, despite the political correct crowd who are dictating to us all from a minority position, (and if we weren't so apathetic about it we would get off our asses and say "Enough!").
One of the few things left in life worth valuing, in my opinion. The right to have a bitch and express it openly as long as you keep it civil!
Dave_64

Nice one Dave. I'm in complete agreement.

TDU

Increasing population + increasing automation. WTF are people going to do with their day ?

The pollies say train for the jobs that haven't been invented yet. Yeah, righto ! Methinks heading for big crack up !

*are people going to do with their day*
Play with their smart phones and drive a tuck from home
Ian

Kenworth 909 Director.

This was needed to fight a suspected poison attack.
180312M Melbourne Herald Sun - Salisbury (England, UK) military truck.

Roderick

180207W Melbourne Herald Sun iron-ore truck.
Roderick.

All these systems are programmed and maintained by people. There are already examples in vehicles where the availability to control vehicles the old fashioned way has been programmed out. They also can't and don't think of all the possibilities or no project would ever get off the ground due to the expense

two examples are:
1) I remember locking an automatic in 2nd to deal with slippery surfaces and it would stay locked in 2nd. Today the electronic gear boxes use 1st and 2nd in those situations and when I queried the manufacturer as to why they asked 'why didn't you buy traction control'. Some even decide you're going too fast for the selected gear and change up. Driving my wife's Hyundai down some mountain roads I slipped it back to third to let it coast down using engine braking. I had my foot near the brake pedal. After 30 - 35 seconds of the motor being at high revs it changed from 3rd to 6th (as I could tell by the tachometer) and it started speeding up due to the lack of engine braking. No wonder you can smell the brakes on modern cars at the end of a twisty downhill run - they program out the ability to drive properly by catering to those that can't.

2) inappropriately positioned cruise-control sensors. Generally these use an ABS sensor on a wheel. On many cars before traction control this was a driven wheel. Now it's often a non-driven wheel as the same sensor is used for traction control for cost reasons (eg front wheel in rwd car). This becomes dangerous as if the cruise control is on a driven wheel and that wheel loses traction (eg wet road) that wheel will keep going the same pace but the vehicles ground speed will slow as the cruise control believes it's still doing the requested pace. If it's on a non-driven wheel then if that wheel slows (eg aquaplanes) the cruise control believes the vehicle is slowing and opens the throttle. It happened when I was driving an AU Falcon and it had dropped top full throttle in 2nd gear to make up the speed. Of course by the time this happened the rear wheels were on the slippery surface so the full throttle application just got them spinning. Commodores, Mercedes, BMW, Falcons and other vehicles have the same design flaw