If robots actually replaced all human labour and left nothing for humans to be employed at, then the robots
necessarily can do their own resource extraction.
The current cost of a Boston Dynamics Spot is around a year's income, give or take whose income you're measuring against.
If it were able to do any human task at the same rate as a human — and yes, I know it isn't, this is just a anchoring point for the discussion — a group of them would be able to extract and process enough resources in a year sufficient to double their population, all the way from rocks in the ground to a finished deliverable.
n years later, there are 2^n robots. Sure, sure, that's a whole 33 years to go from one total to one per human, not the numbers the other person gave which would need a much shorter (but not wildly implausible) reproduction time of 5-8 weeks, but the point is still valid.
That exponential stops only when some un-substitutable resource is fully exploited, so I'm not sure what the upper limit actually is, but given we exist I assume 8 billion robots is also possible.
The current cost of a Boston Dynamics Spot is around a year's income, give or take whose income you're measuring against.
If it were able to do any human task at the same rate as a human — and yes, I know it isn't, this is just a anchoring point for the discussion — a group of them would be able to extract and process enough resources in a year sufficient to double their population, all the way from rocks in the ground to a finished deliverable.
n years later, there are 2^n robots. Sure, sure, that's a whole 33 years to go from one total to one per human, not the numbers the other person gave which would need a much shorter (but not wildly implausible) reproduction time of 5-8 weeks, but the point is still valid.
That exponential stops only when some un-substitutable resource is fully exploited, so I'm not sure what the upper limit actually is, but given we exist I assume 8 billion robots is also possible.