Right, because the human race has a really good track record of allowing the benefits of technological productivity increases to impact the poor in a positive way.

Have you ever wondered why we are all so much richer today (even the poor) than in the past? It is not because people decided the way to solve poverty was charity. It is only because we have replaced human labor with artificial labor.

More seriously once you have synthetic labor all the reasons for scarcity and exploitation of the poor end. Sure there will still be people who are on the bottom of society's pecking order, but their actual standard of living will be far beyond those of our richest today.

I think I get what you're saying, but even in Star Trek this doesn't work without a source of essentially-perpetual energy.

It is pretty lucky that we are only 93 million miles away from exactly that :)

I actually did the calculations back in the early 1990s of how many dollars you could generate by capturing all the solar output combined with synthetic labor. It is something on the order of 10^24 times the entire world GDP. When you have that level of resources then scarcity ceases to be a concern.

TBH I do agree that this is possible; I just think we have a long way to go as a civilization just in terms of basic human empathy and decency in addition to the technical challenges. And the technical challenges pale in the face of the sociological ones. I think that a lot of the oppression that happens in the world isn't driven by scarcity but by bigotry and prejudice.

I think it is a bit of a circle - our economic system requires bigotry and prejudice and these in turn help support our current economic system. Break the need for oppression of the poor and my hope is we stop oppressing.

I hope you're right! A lot of the assumptions surrounding scarcity are so deeply-ingrained into the way we think that it's difficult to speculate on what would happen otherwise.