Out in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a young woman named Rachel clings to the side of an oil rig. The wind whips her auburn hair into a wild tangle, and ocean spray drenches her jeans, but she climbs on, determined to uncover evidence of illegal drilling. When she arrives on board, however, she finds something far more sinister at play. This is a snippet of Oil and Darkness, a horror movie set on an oil rig. It features environmental activist Rachel, guilt-ridden rig foreman Jack, and shady corporate executive Ryan, who has been conducting dangerous research on a "new type of highly flammable oil." It's the kind of movie you could swear you caught the second half of once while late-night channel-hopping or dozed blearily through on a long-haul flight.

Out in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a young woman named Rachel clings to the side of an oil rig. The wind whips her auburn hair into a wild tangle, and ocean spray drenches her jeans, but she climbs on, determined to uncover evidence of illegal drilling. When she arrives on board, however, she finds something far more sinister at play. This is a snippet of Oil and Darkness, a horror movie set on an oil rig. It features environmental activist Rachel, guilt-ridden rig foreman Jack, and shady corporate executive Ryan, who has been conducting dangerous research on a "new type of highly flammable oil." It's the kind of movie you could swear you caught the second half of once while late-night channel-hopping or dozed blearily through on a long-haul flight.

Meet Spot, the first robot to get its own employee number at Norwegian oil producer Aker BP. Developed by Boston Dynamics, the robot is set to start patrolling Aker BP's oil and gas production vessel at the Skarv field in the Norwegian Sea this year, testing its ability to run inspections, detect hydrocarbon leaks, gather data and generate reports. The upshot for Aker BP, which is seeking to be a front-runner in the digitalization of the oil industry, is to make offshore operations safer and more efficient, the company said as it presented the robot at its capital markets day in Oslo on Tuesday. Aker BP will run the tests with Cognite, the software venture controlled by the oil company's main owner, Aker ASA. "These things never get tired, they have a larger ability to adapt and to gather data," Kjetel Digre, Aker BP's senior vice president for operations, said in an interview.

An autonomous robot will be deployed to an offshore oil and gas platform in the North Sea later this year, in a first for the sector. The £4m project's backers said the move was designed to take humans out of dangerous and dull jobs, and reinvent oil and gas as an industry of the future. Under the pilot scheme, the robot will initially be deployed at the French oil firm Total's gas plant on Shetland before being sent to join the 120 workers on the company's Alwyn platform, 440km north-east of Aberdeen. The machine, made by Austrian firm Taurob and supported on the software side by German university TU Darmstadt, will be used for visual inspections and detecting gas leaks. Rebecca Allison, asset integrity solution centre manager at the publicly-funded Oil and Gas Technology Centre, insisted autonomous robots would not be used to cut the wage burden of offshore workers who are paid a premium for working in tough, remote conditions.

An autonomous robot will be deployed to an offshore oil and gas platform in the North Sea later this year, in a first for the sector. The £4m project's backers said the move was designed to take humans out of dangerous and dull jobs, and reinvent oil and gas as an industry of the future. Under the pilot scheme, the robot will initially be deployed at the French oil firm Total's gas plant on Shetland before being sent to join the 120 workers on the company's Alwyn platform, 440km north-east of Aberdeen. The machine, made by Austrian firm Taurob and supported on the software side by German university TU Darmstadt, will be used for visual inspections and detecting gas leaks. Rebecca Allison, asset integrity solution centre manager at the publicly-funded Oil and Gas Technology Centre, insisted autonomous robots would not be used to cut the wage burden of offshore workers who are paid a premium for working in tough, remote conditions.

"To me, it's not just about automating the rig, it's about automating everything upstream of the rig," says Ahmed Hashmi, head of upstream technology for BP Plc." Using deep learning to listen for early warning signs that a car might be nearing a breakdown. "Jeff Dean, who leads the Google Brain research group, mused last week that some of the work of such workers could be supplanted by software. He described what he termed "automated machine learning" as one of the most promising research avenues his team was exploring." Andrew Ng demonstrates Baidu's new office entrance!

Most likely, your expectations for the age of drone delivery involve cute li'l quadcopters that descend onto your porch with a gentle bzzzz, deposit a box of diapers or a pizza or whatever else you just ordered online, before zooming back to base, ready to deliver the next whim. That's the vision pitched by the likes of Amazon, UPS, and DHL, and it's an appealing one. Boeing has a different idea for delivery drones, one that's bigger by an order of magnitude. Last week, the aerospace giant revealed a prototype for an electric, unmanned cargo air vehicle that it says could haul as much as 500 pounds--that's 400 large Domino's pizzas or 11,291 newborn-sized diapers--as far as 20 miles. "It's a concurrent exploration of a nascent market and nascent technology," says Pete Kunz, the chief technologist for HorizonX, the Boeing skunk works-venture capital arm hybrid division ///something like that/// that built this thing (the marketing team hasn't given it a catchy moniker yet).

There many use cases for the intelligent edge, where a model is trained in the cloud and then deployed to an edge device. For example, a hospital wants to use AI to identify lung cancer on CT scans. Due to patient privacy and bandwidth limitations, a large CT scan containing hundreds of images can be analyzed on a server in the hospital, rather than sending it to the cloud. Another example is predictive maintenance of equipment on an oil rig in the ocean. All the data from the sensors on the oil rig can be sent to a server on the oil rig, and ML models can predict whether equipment is about to break down.

There's a chart I came across earlier this year, and not only does it tell an extremely important story about automation, but it also tells a story about the state of the automation discussion itself. It even reveals how we can expect both automation and the discussion around automation to continue unfolding in the years ahead. The chart is a plot of oil rigs in the United States compared to the number of workers the oil industry employs, and it's an important part of a puzzle that needs to be pieced together before it's too late. What 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't. That observation itself should be extremely interesting to anyone debating whether technological unemployment exists or not, but there's even more to glean from this chart.

The robot on an oil drillship in the Gulf of Mexico made it easier for Mark Rodgers to do his job stringing together heavy, dirty pipes. It could also be a reason he's not working there today. The Iron Roughneck, made by National Oilwell Varco Inc., automates the repetitive and dangerous task of connecting hundreds of segments of drill pipe as they're shoved through miles of ocean water and oil-bearing rock. The machine has also cut to two from three the need for roustabouts, estimates Rodgers, who took a job repairing appliances after being laid off from Transocean Ltd. "I'd love to go back offshore," he says. The odds are against him.