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February 1, 6: Last Updated February 1, 6: On Tuesday, Suncor Energy, the corporate whale of the Alberta oilsands, announced the next grand technological shift in bitumen production. This is a big deal not just because Suncor is one of the dozen or so biggest public companies in Canada by revenue.

Important transitions in the oilsands tend to also be pivotal moments in the history of Alberta. And I suppose there is nothing very romantic about it. What we are talking about is self-driving mega-trucks. Suncor has been testing them on a small scale for four years, and is going ahead with a near-total replacement of the truck fleet that is the heart of its business.

If you are in one of those positions, you face a moment of difficult adaptation, and this is your official advance warning, if you still needed one.

There cannot be much doubt that self-driving ore trucks will work. A surface mine is the killer app for autonomous vehicles. In the short term, organized labour can bot comment status fb romantism expected to carp a little bot comment status fb romantism safety, as a tactic for keeping high-paid human beings in the cabs of those trucks.

But the culture of worker-versus-boss struggle in the oilsands tends to be fairly low-temperature: And the government of the province is in the dual position of regulator and resource owner.

But it is useful for facilitating profitable technical change. This was, in an oilsands setting, an experimental system, one borrowed naively from the surface coal-mining business. They needed endless care and armies of mechanics and machinists. This shift meant layoffs and job changes, as the one announced this week will.

Every news item about autonomous haulage at Suncor will mention job losses, and some people will take that to be a condemnation of this technological development.

That such people are plain fools ought to be obvious. The desirable end-state for bitumen extraction, everything else being equal, is for it to be done with no human intervention or risk of harm to humans at all — with automata doing the work and the people of Alberta collecting their claim on the profits and passing a share on to the remainder of Confederation, naturellement, as we do now. Ideally the oilsands would be operated by one person in a comfortable control centre, perhaps in Edmonton.

And it would all cost next to nothing. Suncor is taking another step in that direction. Two heavy haulers unload at the Suncor oilsands mine in a file photo from Filed under Full Comment.

The robot's shadow falls on Fort Mac, bringing layoffs. There's no smoking gun to bot comment status fb romantism Jimmy DeMaria is a major crime boss.

Cautious, smart and a 'workaholic' businessman, he's also well-practiced in bureaucratic war. The horror lives bot comment status fb romantism the people who saw it, bot comment status fb romantism the people who bot comment status fb romantism and those who wish they could have done more.

For some, it might never go away. Find National Post on Facebook.