Vent: Suggesting ROVs for deep dives always starts a fight on the barge.

I think robots do risky jobs better than we can.

4 comments

4 Comments

Man, that cuts right to the heart of it. It's easy to forget there are people behind those job loss numbers, watching a lifetime of skill get turned into a desk job. The culture war makes perfect sense when you frame it that way.

paigew801mo ago

Yeah, the fight about ROVs is real. I saw a whole article about how the argument isn't really about safety, but about changing a whole culture of work.

ben6981mo ago

A friend of mine was a diver for underwater inspections until his firm switched to remote vehicles. The old crew hated the new robots because they made years of hands-on skill seem useless overnight. Management kept talking about safety stats, but the guys on the platform knew it was about cutting jobs and changing their whole way of working. My friend said the biggest fights were over who would control the screens, not about the actual risk involved. It became a power struggle between the field guys and the office techs, with tradition completely thrown out. That article is right, the safety talk is just a cover for a much bigger culture war.

jason_wells1mo ago

Look at how these arguments always play out. Old hands see robots as a threat to their hard earned skills, like divers losing work to remote cameras. The safety talk is just a shiny cover for the real mess, which is about control and who gets to say how the job is done. You put a guy in a warm room running a robot instead of in the water, and of course the guys on the barge feel replaced. That culture war is what fuels the fights, not any real debate about what's safer. It's a power shift dressed up as progress.