Chapter 1: What insights do Alan and James share about the mining summit in Perth?
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Hello, I'm Alan Kohler, editor-at-large of Intelligence Investor and finance presenter and columnist and podcaster for the ABC.
And I'm James Thompson, senior Chanticleer columnist at the Australian Financial Review.
And we are The Money Cafe. And James, you're in Perth. Why are you there?
I'm in Perth, yes. We have our mining summit here today on Wednesday and... It's always a great event. Great to get over to Perth. We went up to the Pilbara on Monday and had a look at one of Rio Tinto's mines called Western Ranges. And I hadn't been up there before, so it was quite an experience.
You sort of write about the Pilbara and mining for 25 years, but to finally get there and have a look and see.
see just the scale of just one mine was it was quite eye-opening i flew over the pilbara um once i don't think in 1975 with lang hancock driving the plane was a small plane and he was like hancock was driving and uh he was showing me his you know whatever he had up there and We were up high at one point and he says, have a look at this, and he dives down and did a massive dive.
I thought I was going to die. Anyway. We had no such acrobatics. I mean, even… Even that is a really good point, Alan. You're flying full Qantas jets up to these tiny towns, such is the sort of infrastructure and the logistics of the FIFO system, and it's amazing. Yeah. So, yeah, very interesting.
Very good. Okay, so Iran, what do we think – They haven't got a deal yet. Trump's been talking it up for a few days, and then he starts blowing up their ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and that's going to – I mean, Iran's got upset about that, so that's going to hold up a deal between the two, isn't it?
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Chapter 2: How does the geopolitical situation in Iran affect global markets?
Like everybody else, there's a whole lot of noise around that, I think. You know, everyone's got an idea about AI, but how it's practically being used is what I'm hoping to explore on this panel.
The trains are being run out of centres, you know, control centres in Perth, right? Yeah, that's exactly right.
By human beings.
By human beings. So maybe they can replace the human beings in those places with AI.
Well, I mean, that is a question that I've got. Like you... You see on these mine sites, obviously it's, you know, very dangerous work, but all these people flying in and flying out, if you had humanoid robots, you could eliminate that as well. I mean, think of the... Think of the jet fuel you save. Think of the time you save for people. Think of the safety benefits.
Think of the logistics that you don't need. I mean, I don't know how far away that is.
What sort of things are the human beings doing on the mines that the humanoid robots could do?
There, well, there are some tasks like trade-based tasks, you know, diesel mechanics, fitters, people supervising equipment and all that sort of stuff, checking for safety issues and inspecting stuff. So you would imagine that over time. you could use some form of humanoid robot to do some of that work. So, yeah, I think that's completely possible.
And you just think of the, yeah, the FIFO system places a lot of strain on a lot of different things, so... It would seem to me to be a pretty obvious solution, but the mining companies aren't talking about that. I mean, the other thing with AI, Alan, overnight, I've been noticing this, that there's a few companies starting to talk about the cost of AI and how expensive it's becoming.
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