> Roughly none of that land is freely available.

You'll have to qualify that statement a little. Here is 5 acres of land in Texas for $1500 [1], found it in about 60 seconds.

[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/209109538...

I actually said roughly, I didn't go back and edit that in or anything.

If you want to do brass tacks or whatever, buy it and scrape out a living to prove that cheap scrub desert makes a point about land being available.

What if automation and robotics made homesteading much easier, and more likely to succeed on land that was previously considered useless?

Obviously water and other resources are going to be an issue, but as a labour multiplier, AI and robotics have huge potential.

> What if automation and robotics made homesteading much easier, and more likely to succeed on land that was previously considered useless?

Then that land (if not already privately owned and actually available for homesteading) will be homesteaded, privatized, enter the land market, and not be rent-free land that is available. Just like the land that was attractive for homesteading in the past has been. Sure, its a one-time land-rush just like the initial homestead act, but after that the same forces of centralization of property that always work in a capitalist economy will work on it.

West of the 100th Meridian, water gets scarce. Land out here has value pretty much in proportion to how much water it has available, because you can't grow anything on it without water. And you can't fix lack of water by availability of robots.

Unfortunately, AI and robotics are only available to those with great capital and knowledge on how to apply those technologies; and I don't really see that changing any time soon.

And the cost of plumbing and electrifying that land would be astronomical. Public works have a network effect.