The near-term future of automation isn’t dramatic like the new Channel 4-AMC show Humans. There’ll be no Uncanny Valley to disorient us, just a downward slope. No struggle for dominance–it’s been decided. Tomorrow won’t look unsettlingly sort of like you and me. It will look nothing like us at all.

An entire team of Australian dockworkers has been disappeared by machines in the last two months. From Jacob Saulwick at the Sydney Morning Herald:

At Sydney’s Port Botany, every hour of every day, the robots are dancing.

Well, they look like they are dancing – these 45 so-called AutoStrads, or automated straddles, machines that have taken on the work that until a couple of months ago was at least in part performed by dockworkers.

Almost 20 years ago, the Patrick container terminal at Botany played host to one of the most divisive industrial battles in Australian history, as the stevedoring company attempted to break the back of its union-dominated workforce.

In some respects that battle was won in April.

It was then that Patrick introduced, following a four-year investment program, a level of automation into its stevedoring operation that might be unsurpassed in the world.

“This is fully automated, there are no human beings, literally from the moment this truck driver stepped out of his cabin from then onwards this AutoStrad will take it right through the quay line without any humans interfacing at all,” Alistair Field, the managing director of Patrick Terminals and Logistics, a division of Asciano, said on Wednesday.•