When all thy mercies, oh my progress...
I think you're a victim of the fallacy of eternal growth thaught for years by capitalist and communist economists alike (and even picked up by most green movements around the globe). If you realize that our consumption is way above it's sustainable limit, the only way to prove that we have really evolved from the barbarism of a pack of wolves is to try everything possible to fold back consumption into this limit.
And since we start crossing some irreversibility thresholds, this means acting now. So we should start cutting consumption and innovate existing technologies so that they become more efficient, instead of increasing consumption and hoping (which roots back to religion – it's kind of interesting that in a time of the decline of classic, philosophical religions, most of the people have adopted blind trust into technology, which does not recognise hardship or offer any consolence in it) for some random technological breakthrough (which would then need years to be adapted on scale – of course we can still search (R&D is not that big of a polluter (except for nukes))). I really would like to see some calculations for "the bigger picture", which show that 5G and the entailing consumption frenzy will bring us nearer to a sustainable society.
Practically for remote-controlled exvacators: why can't you just put a remote control-terminal ontop of the next fibre-"hub"? 5G (or at least the part, where you build small cells with high-frequency-bands) won't be deployed in Alaska anytime soon and this is something which you can easily add on todays infrastructure once you realize that it's actually beneficial. Maybe you should also take a step back on exvacation – with steel and concrete making up about 15% of carbon-dioxide emissions, I doubt that reducing transportation for construction workers (in industrialized countries, I doubt that any construction "worker" in China or Arabia has a car...) has anywhere near the same impact as a 5% reduction in construction.