Capitalism is intended to satiate the desires of humans and raise the QoL of humans. If humans are not involved, capitalism has no purpose.
You have what the intergalactic community would call "a very planetary mindset."
As for sentience, we need to define that first because sci-fi has eviscerated its meaning. Sentience is the capacity for subjective experience. Sapience is human-level intelligence. Neither necessarily implies a capacity for suffering, altruism, other evolved human traits that force irrational market decisions. The coal miner is a great example even if I don't think it actually addressed my question. Altruism and empathy make us prioritize humane decisions over rational ones, but of course you'll notice that the rise of humane labor standards in the west really just shunted inhumane but rational decision-making to the eastern adn southern hemispheres. And you'll notice that in sectors that use inhumane labor, it's hard not to. A smartphone company that didn't use the Congo coltan mines and Shenzhen factories would be outcompeted by the ones that do.
The good question here is would synthetic life (maybe algorithm is the wrong word, it has certain connotations) be rent-seeking. And I dunno dude. The combination of extreme pragmatism (maybe algorithm is the right word after all) with human+ analytical ability is a real singularity point, weird shit starts happening and it's hard to predict. Yudkowsky and Co.'s paper on AI Corrigibility is interesting in that regard.
On the subject of my challenge, rent-seeking is the only "problem with capitalism" I can think of that I can't say would be solved by getting rid of humans. It might even be made worse. Congration, you done it.
I can start a new thread if the subject of robocapitalism outgrows this one.
I'm actually working on two different creative writing projects on this subject, which I might post on here when I'm happy with them. One is about an r/futurology UBI utopia where robots have full control of the productive apparatus and provide humans the bare minimum requirements of food, shelter, and entertainment, and use remotely-activated contraception implants to keep the population slowly trending towards zero.
The characters wander around their increasingly desolate and run-down city, eating and doing drugs and watching TV, while the protagonist (he was taught to read and think by his parents, who were taught by their parents, and so on, a tradition that dies with the protagonist) tries to make sense of the world through the lens of the books he's managed to scavenge. Brave New World set in a growing mountain of garbage, basically.
The other one's less traditional, a series of technical documents (memos, corporate training materials, etc.) from a posthuman hyperdemocracy where digitized corporations mass-produce synthetic voters. The only laws on the books regard the definitions of voting personhood, and the only goal is to adjust those laws to privilege your production and compression methods. The ends are the means.