| 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. |
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.