General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This is the future. It doesn't include jobs for humans. [View all]DireStrike
(6,452 posts)Taking humans out of the manufacturing equation doesn't change the net energy by that much.
Creative and engineering bots don't take that much more energy than modern computers.
Service bots may indeed require a lot of energy, because almost 100% of that is physical labor currently done by humans. That might actually be the last sector of the human economy to go away.
The materials and energy are a chicken and egg problem. You can make clean energy using rare earth materials, in order to extract more materials which are increasingly energy-expensive to extract! We still may have some nice options though, like sea floor mining and asteroid mining. As for the energy, as long as we have room in space to construct solar panels, we should be ok...