You're correct in pointing out that Malthusians have never been correct, but there's a difference between being a Malthusian and pointing out that land is not going to become irrelevant.
Let's get some back of the envelope calculations here. At current equilibrium price, it takes about 100 million USD to build an apartment complex for 2500 families(probably the most land-efficient way to get housing) here (and my country is good at building cost effective apartment complexes.) Excluding the cost of buying land, that total cost will drop to about 70 million.
I already said that we're going to have 3 billion more people by 2050. With these 3 billion and an average family of 4 (so that population stays the same), we need housing for .75 billion families. Dividing that by 2500 gives 300,000, and multiplying that by 100 mil. USD gives 30 trillion USD. That's about 1/3 of total world production per year, and that's excluding a lot of relevant and big costs(like price elasticity of inputs for building, regulation changes, location and housing type preference, increased world demand for goods and services, etc.) Even though it's going to be paid over 30 years that's costing 1% of the total world production at very minimum and that has to come out of nowhere(you cannot simply reallocate but have to invent some way to increase production.) At GDP growth rate of about 2% for the developed world, that means you have to put at minimum about half of that growth rate into housing problem.
So far we just touched on housing. What about factories, data centers, shopping malls, roads and rails, farming complexes, mines for new resources, and other things that need land? Land is important and will still be important in the future.
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I explained the reason that the West gained an agricultural and then industrial revolution which catapulted us to orders-of-magnitude higher productivity and standard-of-living compared to the East (i.e. Asia).
Make sure you click the link above and read the entire linked blog post to understand deeply what I will summarize below.
It was the network effects of pursuing the maximum division-of-labor and the early analog of the Internet in form of an efficient transportation network focused on using arable land for producing horses instead of pork and human porters that China chose.
You’re advocating the world will make the same mistake as the Asians did and prefer to choose lowest cost instead of highest advance.
Sure it’s cheaper (as in cheapskate stupid) to sprawl out on land horizontally than to build tightly vertically integrated knowledge age global village pods, but so were human porters cheaper than horses.
Your computation also fails to factor in how much more efficient (less costly) robots will be at constructing everything. The cost of robots has been decreasing exponentially. It is just like the first calculators in the 1970s that cost more $500 inflation-adjusted. Now they cost $10.
I have just taught you a very important lesson. Don’t ever bet against technological advance. Ever.
P.S. I am not trying to be condescending nor act like I know it all. I am just reasonably certain about this conjecture about land becoming worthless as we leave the fixed capital investment ages and move into the non-monetary knowledge age. Highly recommend you click that link also.
EDIT: also a follow-up which I wrote on
bitcointalk.orgin the context of prior major collapses of civilization into Dark Ages.