\u201cWhat should be immediately apparent is that as the number of oil rigs declined due to falling oil prices, so did the number of workers the oil industry employed. But when the number of oil rigs began to rebound, the number of workers employed didn\u2019t. That observation itself should be extremely interesting to anyone debating whether technological unemployment exists or not, but there\u2019s even more to glean from this chart.<\/p>\n
First, have you even heard of automated oil rigs, or are they new to you? They\u2019re called \u201cIron Roughnecks\u201d and they automate the extremely repetitive task of connecting drill pipe segments to each other as they\u2019re shoved deep into .. Thanks to automated drilling, a once dangerous and very laborious task now requires fewer people to accomplish. Automation of oil rigs means that one rig can do more with fewer workers. In fact, it\u2019s expected that what once took a crew of 20 will soon take a crew of 5. The application of new technologies to oil drilling means that of the 440,000 jobs lost in the global downturn, as many as 220,000 of those jobs may never come back.\u201d<\/p>\n
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