It seems more likely that we’re just talking about concentrating the number of people who need to work for a living into a smaller group. Short of Detroit: Being Human or Bladerunner style replicants/androids, someone will always have to work to support those who do not. Those tomatoes aren’t going to plant, harvest, and transport themselves to grocery stores. Someone has to do it.
But that kind of technology (if not human-shaped) is what we are talking about. We’re talking about the point where there’s no job needed for the economy a human can do that a machine can’t. Which includes all forms of labor and transportation.
What do we need humans for then? I keep thinking of Ian Banks’ series The Culture about a post-scarcity society run by powerful AIs. A lot of people view Banks’ Culture as a utopian, but I see it as a dystopia where humans are little more than pets the powerful AIs choose to indulge. If the AIs are smart enough to do all our work for us, they’re smart enough to take over.
Nothing. As I’ve said before I expect the result would be the wealthy having 99% or so of humanity exterminated as “useless”, just keeping a few around as slaves (robots don’t care if you rape or torture them, so it’s not as fun).
This is the problem. Lots of people in our society can’t imagine the mindset that true abundance would allow to evolve.
Up until now, all of our economic systems have been predicated on the notion that we can’t produce enough to make everyone “rich”, so they’ve created systems based on that. Generally, capitalism has said, “We can’t all be rich, so some will be rich, and some poor”, while communism has said, “We can’t all be rich, so we’ll all be equally poor”. We can debate how well they’ve lived up to those notions, but that’s generally the idea.
Even now, as we (as was pointed out above) could produce enough food to feed everyone, we don’t, because those underlying assumptions affect how everyone thinks about the problem.
But, there comes a point where the kind of greed and hoarding we see today just stops making sense, even to the people who today are relentless accumulating wealth. And we can see that in miniature, even today.
Consider the Parable of the Buffet Restaurant.
We’ve all eaten at all-you-can-eat restaurants. You pay a reasonable fee, and you can eat all you want.
Now, imagine we go back in time and find a person who lived with famine as a yearly possibility. Show that guy a buffet, and his first reaction is likely to be, “I’m going to take it all! Suckers!”
But what happens when he tries that? He grabs the entire steam tray of fried rice, or mashed potatoes, takes it back to his table, and gloats about how he has everything, and the rest of you losers get nothing!
And then the restaurant brings out another tray of food to replace it.
Wash, rinse, repeat. At some point, it become ridiculous. He’s sitting there with trays full of food he physically can’t eat, and he’s not denying anyone else a bit of rice or potatoes, because the restaurant just keeps bringing out more. While he’s busy stealing all the potatoes, people are getting some rice, and while he’s stealing the rice, people are getting potatoes.
How long does that go on, before he just gives up, and admits he can’t “corner the market” on rice or potatoes? Let alone the sweet and sour chicken balls, the prime rib, the buttered corn, the stir fired noodles, and all the other dishes.
And we see that writ large, in other things today. We produce about 186 million TV sets per year. Elon Musk could buy every TV produced, for 186 billion dollars, and still have over 200 billion dollars of his fortune left over. Elon, were the mindless greed we think exists a real thing, could literally buy every TV made for a year, and deny anyone else a new TV.
But he doesn’t, because that would be utterly ridiculous. He’s spent nearly half his fortune, and then next year, we just build another 186 million TVs. He sits on a hoard of TVs that are simply useless to him, while everyone else just waits a bit to buy a new TV.
At some point, we’ll have enough abundance that every kind of hoarding will look just as ridiculous. Sure, some people will have mental problems, and still try to hoard, but they’ll ultimately fail in such efforts, and in any case, such people would be better treated by mental health interventions, rather than an economic system that crushes everyone in order to avoid hoarding by a few.
Let’s use Chronos’s definition of basic needs as the definition (excluding reproduction, because eew). It includes shelter. But in 1943 when Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was first published, shelter didn’t necessarily include plumbing. Should it? What about air conditioning in a warming environment? The hierarchy didn’t include internet access, which is necessary to participate in a civil society. What about health care? Is that safety? Can’t our health care always get better (unless AI also finds the secret to no-cost immortality for all, which is of course a different sci-fi trope), so isn’t research into health care an insatiable societal need? Can’t we always pursue cleaner waterways for a safer environment?
If humans can play any role in providing these “basic needs,” as the definition of what “basic needs” encompass ratchets up, there will never be a limit to what people need and there will simultaneously always be work for people to help provide them. I maintain that work for people is never going to go away.
Except they don’t. There isn’t a choice except at a societal level - new Minds are constructed with care for humans hard-wired in. And we’re explicitly told that Minds find humans both fascinating and useful. And that Minds that aren’t created imperfect tend to Sublime as soon as they’re switched on. Bank’s Minds aren’t benevolent versions of Skynet - they’re hyperintelligent BUT emotional entities with ethical frameworks, curiosity, peer pressure, inhibitions, social standing, reputations to uphold, etc.
Also, there are lots of other AIs in that setting who are human-equivalent intelligence, so it’s not like they don’t have other options than meatbags if they just wanted stupid pets.
People in the Culture are definitely not the ones in the driver’s seat, so to speak; the Minds are. But why does necessarily that make it a dystopia? The Minds aren’t nefarious, and they take great care to ensure that people don’t lose things like meaning.
A gilded cage is still a cage, right? My idea of a utopia doesn’t include one where we’re essentially pets looked after by some benevolent god-like beings who have our best interest at heart. I’m just weird that way.
A member of the Culture has far more freedom than you and I will ever have. They’re basically free from biological constraints, and die when they get bored enough that they tell a Mind to shoot them into the sun. They can go build entire worlds, if they’re bored.
No one is saying “work will go away”. What will go away is needing work just to survive. There will always be tasks available for those who want them, but those tasks will work towards “nice to have” things, not “NEED to have” things.
I agree with Tired_and_Cranky that what is deemed “NEED to have” will keep growing (just as it has in the past as plumbing, electricity, refrigeration, etc. got included). And I actually don’t think that’s generally a bad thing. It mostly indicates a rise in wealth and (material) living standards.
I’m reminded of a line from a superhuman AI in the Dresden Codak webcomic: "We can give you anything you want, save relevance."
A superhuman AI is going to sideline humans just by existing no matter how benevolent it is.
They can leave anytime they want; they just don’t want to. That’s not a cage. And once the god-like beings exist, them being benevolent is really the best you can hope for. Culture Minds have a taboo against direct mind control, but they can easily convince a human level intelligence to do whatever they want just by talking since we are almost as predictable as a chess piece to them.
“Communism” may have said that, but Marx sure didn’t. He counted on the productive capacity of capitalism to create a world free of scarcity, indeed, one of abundance. Thus he was critical of earlier socialist movements, arguing they just wanted to share the old misery equally rather than move forward.
Thus he has been criticized for sharing a “growth” mentality that has brought us to the edge, perhaps taken us over the edge, of environmental collapse. But he had a few things to say about that, too, so there is something to the criticism, but less than many have insisted.
For that matter, Communism at the time didn’t say that; the dogma was still that Communism would be super-productive and shower everyone in wealth. Or at least be fairer about it.
Now, modern Communists in my experience tend to think “consumption and luxury is evil, everyone should live simple lives with minimal amenities”. I mean, I’ve seen them complain that people have too many choices about what variety of food to eat; they often sound like old-time Christians going on about “mortification of the sinful flesh”.
“Worst Party I’ve ever been to.”
We could always ask that antiwork subreddit mod who went on Fox News… 
This is the core dilemma. We allow our society to be driven by momentary increases in comfort and luxury without evaluating the holistic impact those changes have on both individuals and society.
And I’d argue that any increase in wealth and material living standards is best looked at as neutral- and social/global impacts need to be considered before evaluating any change as good or bad. And this is something that we fail to do over and over again, though the impacts on our choices become more and more significant.
I don’t know what complaints @Der_Trihs is referencing specifically, but let’s take “variety of food” as an example. Imagine there is a spectrum of normal consumption, where on one end society only eats regional roots, plants and animals that can be grown locally. On the other end of the spectrum is a society where, regardless of season or location, we weekly consume multiple pounds of seafood, red meat, and ‘fresh’ fruits and vegetables from across the globe.
There are benefits and drawbacks to both ends of the spectrum, and to most places along the spectrum. However, our existing systems over-incentivize one end, regardless of any actual evaluation of societal benefit. The expectation that the “free” market to lead us to sustainable social and environmental structures is one of the biggest failures of the modern world.
When you define “work” as “doing or making something of value,” people absolutely love to work. The only people who don’t are temporarily bedridden or severely mentally depressed. It’s nearly a universal human desire.
It’s only when you define it as “obeying some rich jerk’s irrational demands for most of your waking hours, just to survive” that people start to resent it.
Of course I think it’s entirely possible to eliminate the need to work in order to survive. That in no way means people will stop working though, in my mind.
If anything, it’s the opposite. People will have the freedom and time to obtain the skills, experience and education to do what they actually want to do, making them far more productive, in addition to happier and more secure.
Even if you love your current job and don’t want anything to change, why would you want to work alongside people who hate it and are forced to be there?
I think it’s more a question of how do humans find purpose if we don’t have to work for a living. To be honest, I’m pretty sure I could find fulfilling ways to occupy 8-10 hours a day not sending emails and sitting on meetings.
I mean how much work people do is “needed”? Most (or at least a whole lot of) people don’t hunt, farm, fish, or work in jobs that apply to the building and maintaining of infrastructure or critical services. And ironically those jobs that are most critical are often the crappiest and lowest paid.