ROBOTS BETTER DO
MINERS’ JOB IN NEAR FUTURE
Erle Frayne D. Argonza
Good
evening from the suburban boondocks south of Manila
It’s
playing Latin music in my multimedia at home right now. As I play the danceable
tunes by Buena Vista Social Club, my eyes are focused on the news “Some Chile
miners showing mental crack” in the world news of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
(Aug. 29, 2010).
Let
me then dedicate this piece to the task of mining as a way to honor the miners
of the world. Honoring them means that eventually the human miners will retire
from the job, with robots taking over those rather hazardous tasks related to
mineral extraction.
To
quote the report’s inception, “Five of the miners trapped underground in Chile
The
news coming from Copiaco , Chile
Well,
what else can we expect from toiling workers trapped deep down underground,
with hardly much hope for coming back to the planet’s surface till after months
of hard rescue operations to come. Even a person who doesn’t suffer from
manic-depressive disorder can crack up and manifest depression when confronting
such a life-threatening situation.
If
we go back to the times of the Roman republic, and maybe backtrack 2,000 years
earlier than Rome
The
technology of extracting minerals down underground remains to be dependent on
human or anthropocentric labor for thousands of years now. Not even the
impressive engineering works to dig the minerals from rocks down under can
impress me much at all, they remain the same technology: human-driven
extraction.
While
the miners of antiquity were slaves of the imperial deus ex machina, today’s miners are cogs of the business empires’ deus ex machina. Marginal or small-scale
miners, like the ones we have in the boondocks of northern and southern tips of
the Philippines, are all the more risk-prone to the appalling extraction
conditions and backward technology as they can be buried anytime by
mining-related calamities without healthcare or ‘life plan’ to compensate them.
A
cursory examination of the Chilean miners’ condition allows this analyst to
facilely forecast that at least 1/3 of them (around 2 persons) will be in
advanced form of depression and nervous breakdown as soon as the rescue
operators reach them. Tragic, simply tragic!
That’s
how human labor is treated by corporate capital since the birth of the money
economy anyway: mere objects worth throwing away if they die during production
operations. Miners are among the most classic cases of how capital treats human
labor as cheap dirty eater stuff.
If
indeed corporate capital—and its cultural deodorant ‘corporate social
responsibility’—has the sanguine love for human miners, it should strive pronto
to innovate on robotics that can do the work for the miners. Retire all the
miners of today pronto, compensate them for social security and healthcare, and
then gradually employ the robot miners.
Only
token labor—comprising of technicians and engineers—are needed to operate
robotics-driven mining. Robots won’t suffer from depression in case of mishaps,
they won’t require healthcare and social security but rather maintenance
expenditures appropriate and sufficient for their upkeep.
Retired
miners can then afford to exhibit more productive engagements such as to serve
as eco-tourist guides for students and visitors who may wish to examine former
open-pit mines that have been re-greened with lush vegetation. They can
likewise do some tour guide tasks for mine visits that would be as less
risk-prone as their previous jobs.
Meantime,
let me share my own lines of solidarity to all those suffering miners in Chile
[Philippines,
10 September 2010]
[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,
UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com,
COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,
BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com,
ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,
ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]
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