Post-scarcity

There are two sides to this coin. Usually coins have two sides, and in cases like pos-scarcity one side is quite visible, the other not so much. The visible side is "enough of everything for everyone". Without going into details, it means enough water, food, power... One difficulty is of course the exact definition of the word "enough". In theory there is only so much cheesecake one can eat before getting sick (even I have this limit), so robot cheesecake factory needs to produce only certain amount - but then... some industrious little gnome will find alternative usage for cheesecake, like spreading ten thousand tonnes of it on a mountain slope and put his skis on. It is simply what happens to unlimited resources - they won't stay unlimited. Available resources will be used. That's the law of nature. That's why we need money really, to limit resource usage. Money in today's primitive form was a start, now we can have blockchain comprehensive solution/extension. But yes, accounting. Must have, or else even Sahara could run out of sand. And just to explain, money is just a tool misused by current economic/social system. We can't get rid of the system by getting rid of money.

Second side of the post-scarcity coin is work needing to be done. As long as there is garbage to dispose of, plumbing to be unclogged, proverbial burgers to be flipped - by human hands - we will not have gone beyond scarcity.

Those two sides condition existence of one another. There must be scarcity of goods, so there can be "rewards" for taking out trash, so someone actually does it. But then we have someone whose existence depends on the reward (water. food), and thus we have the fear of joblessness, so in some cases work is artificially created just to ensure the status quo. Like coal mining in Poland - instead of thinking about greener sources, we have a very strong representation of miners, who won't have anything less than the current state of things to continue. They want to mine coal and get paid well for doing so, and to hell with reason.

That's why Universal Basic Income is just a bandaid on otherwise lethal wound. The only hope is that it could enable that jump to true post-scarcity.. When no work needs to be done... Not that there will be no work left - there will be plenty left improving the system, making it better, fixing problems - but it would be voluntary. Similar to open source type of thing. Not everyone will be happy to just sit there and contemplate life free from effort and creativity...

But we're talking not only about unpleasant low-skill jobs that need to go away... Digression: plumbing is by no means "low-skill" job, but it can only be truly appreciated when one had a chance to witness what an unskilled plumber can do (and how much skill it takes to fix plumbing after). So... we're talking about everything that "needs" doing, even if it's somehow considered "noble" or "high-profile". Like banking. We need banking, but we do not need bankers. Similarly we need laws, but we do not need lawyers. We need rules, but we do not rulers. And we need neither advertisement nor advertisers, they can go together into oblivion and scary fairytales for children.