As autonomous technology becomes more deeply embedded in industrial production, the boundaries between human and machine are being redrawn, giving rise to new uncertainties about the meaning of work and the conditions under which work is carried out. In mining, where production systems are complex, interdependent, and capital-intensive, technical innovation is often driven by promises of greater efficiency and safety. At the same time, these ambitions often risk overshadowing social and organisational concerns. The industry’s development of highly automated and data-driven systems has tended to privilege technical performance, leaving questions of human involvement, competence, and responsibility underexamined. When technologies are designed to minimise human intervention but continue to depend on human judgement, a paradox arises: work is reconfigured rather than removed, and the success of the system ultimately rests on those it seeks to replace.
Against this background, the thesis explores how autonomous mining systems are designed, developed, and implemented, and how these processes reshape the work of operators. Its aim is to understand the implications of autonomous systems for operator work by analysing the underlying design and development logics and the organisational changes that follow their implementation. In doing so, the research seeks to illuminate how technological ambitions meet workplace realities and how human and technical subsystems become intertwined in practice.
The analysis combines two complementary perspectives that together bridge the technical and social dimensions of technological change. Sociotechnical Systems Theory provides a foundation for understanding how technical and social subsystems interact and how their balance is crucial for safe and sustainable forms of work. The theory of Communities of Practice extends this view by highlighting implementation as a social process through which people negotiate meaning, build competence, and make new technologies workable in practice. In combination, these perspectives make it possible to analyse autonomous mining systems as sociotechnical phenomena, highlighting their implications for how design logics, organisational structures, and everyday work intersect.
Empirically, the thesis builds on three interrelated qualitative studies that together trace the trajectory from the design and development of autonomous systems to their implementation in mining practice. The studies include a review of existing research on digital transformation in mining, a focus group study with technology developers, and an in-depth case study of an autonomous haulage system in Sweden. Taken together, they provide complementary insights into how assumptions embedded in design are negotiated, adapted, and made workable in organisational settings, revealing how technological ambitions are redefined through everyday practice.
Across the studies, the thesis reveals a tension between the intentions guiding design and the realities of implementation. While development processes frame operators as peripheral to system performance, implementation reintroduces them as central actors in making technology function in practice. The everyday work of sustaining production continues to rely on human judgement, coordination, and anticipation, even as these tasks become more analytical and distributed across roles. Rather than being displaced, operators remain “still in the loop”, though in transformed ways that demand new forms of attention, collaboration, and responsibility.
The findings point to a complex reality where autonomous systems reconfigure rather than replace human work, creating new interdependencies between people, technology, and organisation. These developments have implications for how work is organised and understood, influencing the distribution of competence, collaboration, and control across human and technical domains. In this sense, autonomous technology emerges not only as a technical transformation but as a reorganisation of the conditions under which work is carried out and experienced.
In conclusion, the thesis offers insights into how human and technological systems evolve together within contemporary mining. By bringing sociotechnical and practice-based perspectives into dialogue, it highlights how autonomous technology unfolds as an ongoing process of negotiation and adaptation, rather than a fixed outcome of design and development. This perspective deepens understanding of how work is continually rebalanced between people and technology, and how such rebalancing shapes both organisational life and the experience of work. The future of technological development in autonomous mining systems, this thesis suggests, lies not in separating human and machine, but in understanding how their interaction can sustain safer, more adaptive, and more meaningful forms of work.