In my work I have dealings with a lot of miners and the following event should have us very worried.

A guy told me of a mate who drove a dump truck in the mines.

While on night shift, this guy fell asleep and the first he knew of it was when the control office contacted him to wake him up. The truck was being monitored, in fact it was being controlled by an overriding controller in a remote control room.

Now the worrying part of this is that the control office was in Singapore. So this got me thinking, if they can not just monitor from the likes of Singapore, but control the machine, what does that tell you.

Of cause with the NBN one would assume this would be more appealing to multinational miners and should have alarm bells ringing because what costs $150 K here, would cost tuppence over there.

This page is an interesting example. The first post included the word 'mine' and lo and behold the ad that appears above it is for coal mining exploration!

So what do you suppose we do about it. Trains are being remote controlled as well.
The way work is carried out has been changing since someone invented work.
Drones and remote control is all the rage at the moment so people will use it.
Singapore has one of the worlds fastest broadband systems.

What has the Australian NBN got to do with it. It's not going to be a patch on world standards. Unreliable at the best, we are saddled with the old copper wires that Howard flogged for 12 billion which Abbott bought back for 12 billion $, so your remote driver will stay in Singapore.

Abbotts free trade agreement with Communist China means that zero Aussies will be working in Australian mines or in primary production before the end of the decade so remote control trucks are the least of our problems.

One of the mines has already got driverless dump trucks.
They are monitored from Perth.
The new rail line being built ib Sydney will have driverless trains.
What transport do you think carries more people per day than any other
system and is also driverless ?

Lifts !

When my son worked at the ABC some of their digital video and switching
gear was serviced by the manufacturer from Britain for some functions.
Nothing new !

Everything is going to change and everything will become local as
solar and wind just cannot do the job, and we won't be able to afford nuclear.

I have been around long enough to have heard - in the fifties and sixties - how computers were going to take up so much of our work, that we would have a problem knowing what to do with our leisure time. And here it is, fifty years on, and I am busier than I have ever been, despite owning and using more technology than I can shake a stick at.

Yes, we will have driverless cars, buses, trucks and tractors within the next decade. Does this automatically mean that everyone who uses a car or a bus or a truck or a tractor to earn a living will be out of work?

Somehow, I doubt it.