[imgabe]

I think of it like oxygen. We don't pay for the air we breathe. You don't need an "air" utility to pipe breathable air into your house and have to pay them a monthly bill (yet anyway). You just breathe. You want to breathe harder? Go ahead. Everyone on Earth could run wind sprints all day and we wouldn't run out of air. It replenishes itself naturally.

Once we can do the same with potable water, food, shelter, we'll be at a post-scarcity economy.

[brightball]

That's really the question though:

Who produces the food, water, shelter?

What are the required incentives for them to continue dedicating their scarce time to continuing to produce it?

What are the incentives or rewards for them to invest in the infrastructure, equipment, etc for them to create that?

Who maintains it and how are they compensated for doing so? What benefit do they gain for committing their time to the endeavor while everyone else enjoys the fruits?

Air is an example that actually fits this well. With air, distribution and production are handled by systems that don't require people to construct and maintain. All of those costs go away.

I don't see a point where post-scarcity is realistic until scarcity of time can be addressed.

[TeMPOraL]

That's a good point. I believe the prerequisite for a stable post-scarcity economy is automating the production of all the things we want to not be scarce, over the entire vertical - from getting resources, through manufacturing, delivery, recycling, and maintenance of all of the machines involved. It's a tall order, but not impossible, if we dedicated our minds to it.

What seems to be the real problem is that there is seemingly no good way from here to there. While there are incentives to make things more automated and more efficient, the money from that flows to the wrong places (and with it, power), and there are plenty of incentives for parasitic actors to inject themselves in between steps of any process to try and capture some percentage of the money flow.

[pault]

I've always been convinced that a true post-scarcity economy requires some pretty sophisticated AI and automation for the reasons you specified. A potential solution for technological unemployment is UBI, and UBI is enabled by the technologies that cause the unemployment, which is appealingly tidy in my opinion.

[protonfish]

But staples like water, air, and land (source of food, shelter location and materials) are not about production, they are about claims of ownership and creating tollbooths.

[sn9]

Scarcity of energy is the real bottleneck.

Once the cost of production/storage/transmission of energy has gone down to effectively zero, everything else falls into place.

[vzcx]

Once we can do the same for uranium, platinum, N-(4-Methoxybenzylidene)-4-butylaniline, polyisoprene, hydrogen fuel cells, lithium ion batteries, silicon wafers, liquid oxygen, nitrogen tetroxide, hydrazine...

we'll be at a post-scarcity economy.