So I've spent a sleepless night estimating potential climate impacts from increased automation. Assuming it effectively increases worker productivity and that we need to find new jobs for the unemployed, very modest increases in productivity tip us over to climate catastrophe.
What I did was to use a great model developed by Jorgen Randers for his book 2052, available in Excel form from the book's website, and toyed around with productivity figures. Randers assumes productivity growth will stop and hence we'll stay below 3 degrees.
Simply assuming that global productivity growth is 50% higher than Randers assumed (that is, on average about 3% per year from now on), we'll definitely breach 3 degrees and enter the "here be dragons" territory. A more thorough automation revolution could easily add much more!
And this is assuming that increased productivity *only* increases energy use, not other resource use. If we counted that, it's much worse.
Overall, I heartily recommend everyone to read Randers's book, 2052. It's a well written and compelling extrapolation of current trends, and a great baseline model for thinking about the future. That the model is freely available is a huge bonus!
Another excellent resource is the C-ROADS model, where everyone can check what temperature increases might result from a given emissions profile. I used it to estimate the impacts here.
climateinteractive.org/tools/c-roads/
climateinteractive.org/tools/c-roads/
