Industrial ecology is the ecology the modern world was built to run: one organized around the scarcity of human productive capacity. Machines amplified human effort, but people remained necessary almost everywhere — to design, manage, build, teach, repair — so an entire social architecture grew up around that necessity, compressed into a chain that became culturally invisible:
labor → productivity → income → resources → security → status → participation
Healthcare, housing, retirement, status, education, and even the language of contribution all attached to work, because human effort was scarce and production needed it. Its organizing question is how can we efficiently use human capacity to produce what society requires? — and its implicit deal is the industrial bargain. The whole arrangement holds together only as long as human labor stays necessary enough to bargain with, which is exactly what an AI ecology alters. See Industrial and AI Ecology.