Life is fundamentally about getting resources to sustain yourself. In that regard, humanity is, more and more dependent on the industry. At the same time, the industry is less and less dependent on humanity, since it is deriving more and more of its power and intelligence from machines.
We will probably reach a point the industry doesn't improve its survival ability by feeding and serving people. If that happens we will have reached a point where we do not have the ability to extract resources on our own since machines do all the critical parts of the job and we won't have the know how/or the access to resources.
Specifically:
- mining, farming and transportation is in the process of being automated away, as is manufacturing.
- in a world dominated by renewable energy, the cost of energy will depend on local weather. To optimize the logistic operations, we'll have to integrate weather predictions and adapt the flux of goods. Humans won't be able to compete with machines for that task, and logistics will also be automated away.
Once that part of the industry can work without human input, we'll be in deep trouble. The rest of the human economy is the result of accidental complexity due to the fact that meatware stems from biology.
This is the natural consequence of optimization and growth seeking. The only way to optimize human labor fast enough to be competitive is to optimize it away. If we're not economically competitive we will not survive. We are in the process of making ourselves redundant, and magic thinking makes us believe that it will end nicely.