I am not an engineer, and I will say this upfront. I am also a big friend of automation. When it works, it removes one of the most unreliable components in any system: humans. Human error sits behind a depressing number of catastrophic failures, and anyone pretending otherwise is either naïve or selling something.
That said, automation is not magic. It is a trade. You remove one class of problems and introduce another. Automation adds complexity, and complexity has a nasty habit of creating entirely new failure modes—often ones that only reveal themselves under stress. There is a reason why Western main battle tanks traditionally avoided autoloaders. Instead of clever machinery, they kept a human loader in the loop. Why? Because autoloaders add mechanical and software complexity, and in the middle of a tank battle, when things are loud, violent, and chaotic, you do not want elegant systems that fail gracelessly.
Only now, decades later, are autoloaders being reconsidered in the West—and not because the old reasoning was wrong, but because the technology has finally matured enough to reduce the downside. Time matters. Iteration matters. Blood-on-the-floor learning matters.
I do not know how far automation in drilling has really come, despite the marketing gloss and the breathless press releases. But knowing the history of large industrial projects—and knowing how many things can go wrong even in well-understood systems—I would say: hold your horses. Do not sell the farm yet. Do not assume that a few demos and pilot projects mean the problem is solved.
Automation will almost certainly do a lot to make drilling cheaper, safer, and more predictable again. I believe that. But belief is cheap. Execution is not. Let the bellwethers run first. Let them break things quietly. Then we will see what is real and what was just another PowerPoint fantasy.
