Economy of scale is a grandiose thing. And in my opinion, it’s going to be the main solution to our energy and climate crisis.

Throughout human history, it’s been the main driving factor behind innovation and civilization. We first gathered in villages because of agriculture’s ability to feed many people with less labor, allowing us to produce much more food than ever before, which then allowed for the development of writing systems to track commerce, which needed more complicated mathematics, allowing us to create great architectural works, which taught us about logistics because of the sheer amount of materials required, etc.

This need for more and more scalable processes culminated in the industrial revolution. Machines began to replace people both at work and at home. Home appliances indirectly freed women from their roles as housewives, maids, and servants. Because of the industrial revolution, women could now pursue more jobs and higher education than they previously could.

As vastly more people were free (and allowed…) to work, humanity began to innovate faster and faster. We visited the moon in no small part thanks to the women freed by the vast ramifications of cheap machine labour (Katherine Johnson and Mary W. Jackson come to mind).

All of this thanks to economies of scale. But we cannot rest quite yet.

Our consumerist attitudes consume an enormous amount of energy, not only to produce the goods we need, but also for shipping them. To me, the solution lies in intelligent robotics, our next big step in industrial automation (“Industry 4.0”).

Paired with green energy sources, robots are much more energy-efficient than humans. They can also do jobs humans simply cannot do, such as recycling used electronics to recover minute amounts of rare minerals, or even recovering plastic pollution from the ocean and, eventually, from landfills. Other examples include killing weeds without the use of pesticides, planting, watering, and monitoring agriculture, or doing ecological surveys.

Not only are they more efficient at their actual jobs, they also don’t need to commute from home to work, or need any of the obvious human needs, such as recreation, socialising, and the like, which all cost energy. This also implies that the need for shipping goods to support these very human-specific habits is greatly diminished.

With cheap-enough robots, we can install manufacturing plants much closer to the source of consumption, which isn’t possible with a human workforce that requires amenities close to its jobsite. We could hide enormous robot factories under the earth, allowing for a cleaner surface earth, and more protected areas for nature. Robots need neither sun, nor clean air, nor food.

And I won’t even mention the obvious fact that relocating our current manufacturing workforce closer to where their goods are consumed is impossible: richer countries only allow worker exploitation when workers are in foreign countries (the incredible number of sweatshops in poorer countries that make goods for richer countries is proof enough…) Automation helps those workers too: as automation scales up, these workers will need to pivot to less labor-intensive jobs, and the education rate of affected countries will go up (as we can infer from the effects of the first industrial revolutions), leading to societal pressure to do better human-rights-wise, climate-wise, and energy-consumption-wise.

Economy of scale is a grandiose thing. When all human needs are factored in, robots are insanely more energy efficient. This vast reduction in shipping volume and increase in automation has already begun, and will only accelerate in the coming years. Our last jump in automation got us from pigeon messengers to the internet. I cannot wait to see where the increase in available human brain power for research and development caused by robotic automation brings us!

This all fits in the idea of a “solarpunk future”, a future where everything that can be automated is automated, and where the automation uses fully renewable/recyclable energy and material sources.

Image source: pixabay