Robocalypse?

Robocalypse: What’s not to like about the elimination of  all human labor with robots? Isn’t it good to eliminate labor with productivity?

In the pre-industrial world, filled with fossil fuels, minerals and ores, and empty of people and pollution, those before us brilliantly eliminated much labor using these resources and new techniques. And it fit: the techniques proliferated, the population burgeoned and the inevitable pollution dissipated at first. Techniques were key to this transformation, inspired and rewarded by patents, and by research and development tax write-offs, and quantified by measuring labor productivity. Such a central and celebrated measure was soon referred to simply as ‘productivity’, and expected to grow forever.
So the world filled with people and pollution, while emptying of the easiest-to-access resources. At first, negligible resources were used up in transforming resources into products, yet eventually, coal might be mined from such difficult-to-access seams so rocky that machinery breaks faster than the coal dug can repair it. This exemplifies the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) reaching zero, where net energy returns have dwindled to nothing. At that point it is easier to stay home than to work and burn all the mined coal just to mine, repair and clean up after that very mining. Another way to zero EROEI is through increasingly risky and polluting mining or oil drilling, where cleaning up the inevitable seems unaffordable, and is worse than the resources extracted are good.
In our world today, still filling with willing workers, pollution and problems, while emptying of easy-to-access resources, we can all be better off by increasing resource productivity while sacrificing labor productivity. We can employ many more, pollute much less and conserve our dwindling limiting resources. This can clearly help the worst-off. But what of the majority? It turns out that even the best-off of us can benefit by opportunity broadly increasing, since we are all measurably stressed by the fear of poverty and healthily reassured by greater equality of social opportunity, as documented in The Spirit Level.
Instead of the Robocalypse sparing us lives of drudgery, further elimination of labor worsens our lives, and misses the chance to make the best use of what we have the least of.
But isn’t this Robocalypse inevitable? It may be, but why hurry to meet it? Instead, we can slow the evolution of labor-eliminating techniques by lessening revenue loss via tax write-offs for research and development, and for further extraction of fossil fuels we can’t afford to burn.
Hat tips to Herman Daly, Hazel Henderson, Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett and others.