The industrial ecosystem

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution factories have always required workers, but as time has gone on the number of workers required to produce any given product has decreased as the amount of automation introduced has correspondingly increased. It seems likely that at some point the amount of labour needed to run a large industrial facility will reach the level of zero. There will also come a time where no human labour - however cheap or Dickensian in character - will be able to compete against fully automated factories. This may seem somewhat far fetched, but having visited facilities which seem to be well advanced along this path I can certainly believe that this could happen within the next few decades.

Just as the blue collar worker is being squeezed by the relentless advance of automation so too are the white collar classes - the pen pushers and desk jockeys. Digital computers were originally created to automate white collar work, in the form of hundreds of human "computers" laboriously carrying out code breaking calculations with paper and pencil, and as artificial intelligence algorithms become more sophisticated the levels at which they can be successfully applied will rise, eventually exposing even the uppermost echelons of company management to direct competition by automated reasoning and decision making systems capable of working with far superior speed, accuracy and bottom line economic performance.

So imagine a situation in which a single human caretaker runs a large fully automated business empire having no human employees. What if even this single owner were made redundant or were to die leaving no successors. Would it be possible to have a large industry which was neither owned nor run by humans, and if so what would be its legal status? I think there is a precedent for this kind of situation because we already have large and extremely productive industries which fall into this category - the world's ecosystems. The natural ecosystem sustains human life on earth and I think that future (originally man-made) industries will increasingly come to resemble ecosystems, in that they will be things which we rely upon but have little direct involvement with their internal workings.