FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE DEHUMANIZING, BACK-BREAKING LABOR...:

The drones, which cruise at a leisurely 3-5 miles per hour, are doing work typically reserved for manned research ships -- but for a small fraction of the cost.

California-based Saildrone, which raised $14 million in funding from impact investors last September, says its drones can be operated for only 5% of the cost of a manned vessel.

FOR millennia, man has broken rocks. Whether with pickaxe or dynamite, their own or animal muscle, in a digger or a diesel truck, thick-necked miners have been at the centre of an industry that supplies the raw materials for almost all industrial activity. [...]

On a visit to Rio's Hope Downs 4 mine in the Pilbara, it is eerie at first to watch 300-tonne trucks speeding uphill in a cloud of red dust with no one in the cab. Then it becomes endearing, as you watch supersized robotic mammoths so safety-obsessed that when sagebrush blows in their way, they judder to a halt.

As for the mine's managers, they are struck by the silence; there is no longer a steady stream of banter across drivers' two-way radios. They also welcome the productivity gains. Over a 12-hour period, they say, manned trucks are competitive, but over 24 hours and longer, the absence of coffee breaks, fatigue and driver changeovers begins to tell. The autonomous trucks stop only once a day for refuelling. "Then you pat them on the bum and out they go again," one says. He adds that the workforce at the mine is already about one-third lower as a result of automation. The 76 autonomous vehicles in Rio's 400-strong truck fleet in the Pilbara are an estimated 15% cheaper to run than the rest.

Two hours' flight away, at Rio's operations centre in Perth, engineers remotely control the equipment with screens and computers. "You have to blow dust in their faces to make them feel like they're in the Pilbara, otherwise it's too comfortable," quips an executive, as he oversees desk-bound employees operating two of Rio's six autonomous rigs digging into the Pilbara rock. Rio's boss of iron ore, Chris Salisbury, says that autonomy enables drilling to run for almost a third longer on average than with manned rigs, and to churn through 10% more metres per hour. The extra data collected helps the firm to evaluate the quality of the ore for further digging.

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