A continuous mining machine breaks through a wall of coal at the Horizon Coal Mine outside Helper, Utah, in 2009. ThE Charleston Gazette’s late publisher, W.E. “Ned” Chilton III, once predicted a future day when the Mountain State would have no underground miners — because robotic digging machines, controlled by operators at video screens on the surface, would do the dirty, dangerous work below.
His forecast seems to be coming true. Around the world, in all types of mining, automated machines are replacing human diggers. Forbes magazine calls them “the robots that will mine in hell.”
The magazine described a 7,000-foot-deep […]
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