> The industrial revolution didn't really change anything about land.
I didn't say otherwise.
I said the industrial revolution changed what wealth meant. We don't pay for rents with the productive yield of vegetable gardens, and a lawn is no longer a symbol of conspicuous consumption due to signifying that the owner/tenant is so rich they don't need all their land to be productive.
And indeed, while land is foundational, it's fine to just rent that land in many parts of the world. Even businesses do that.
I still expect us to have money after AI does whatever it does (unless that thing is "kill everyone"), I simply also expect that money to be an irrelevant part of how we measure the wealth of the world.
(If "world" is even the right term at that point).
> Arguably, it's much more important, and even more relevant today given how our land use policy is disastrous for our species and climate.
Not so; land use policy today is absolutely not a disaster for our species, though some specific disasters have happened on the scale of the depression era dustbowl or more recently Zimbabwe. For our climate, while we need to do better, land use is not the primary issue, it's about 18.4% of the problem vs. 73.2% being energy.
> So, yes. It is important to ask how consumers will pay for all these robots if they don't have any sort of income that would make using robots economical.
With a 2 year old laptop and model, making a picture with Stable Diffusion in a place where energy costs $0.1/kWh, costs about the same as paying a human on the UN abject poverty threshold for enough food to not starve for 4.43 seconds.
"How will we pay for it" doesn't mean the humans get to keep their jobs. It can be a rallying call for UBI, if that's what you want?
But robots-with-AI that can do anything a human can do, don't need humans to supply money.