User blog comment:Yuy168/Why Post-Scarcity Doesn't Work/@comment-76.190.203.221-20140201045731

Mysterious anonymous user here, though I suspect at least one active member here will recognize me once I've said my tiny little two cents on the matter.

First. we may live in a limited universe, but we do not live in a finite omniverse. Anybody capable of trasitioning with enough ease from one universe to another and back can exploit an infinite number of resources. Of course, though this removes scarcity of material, there would remain scarcity of manpower; you need something to gather these materials. If robotics and AI advance enough to function with autonomy enough to replace the biological workforce of a transuniversal society, it is entirely possible to establish post-scarcity status.

And second, you speak as if though total societal collapse is also a bad thing. Total societal collapse is nature's hard reset button; if a society breaches the socio-technological balance, then it becomes wont to collapse due to that breach. A society that achieves post-scarcity before it is culturally ready will collapse, yes. But you assume that the culture of such a society would be identical or even just similair to modern human cultures. We're talking hundreds of thousands of years ahead of humanity; there's going to be a massive difference, and not just in technology. Really, it's been an opinion of mine for an extended period of time that the entire purpose of society as we know it is to allow a culture to progress to the point where labor is no longer needed for survival, allowing them to remove their concerns from the concrete and focus entirely on the abstract world, shifting gears from the physical to the metaphysical. In other words, the purpose of STEM is to allow the artist to create art. As such, a post-scarcity society is the inevitability of any society which manages to survive long enough. Again, though, the socio-technological balance must be kept for such survival to be possible.

PS, you also make it sound like the State being unable to function is a bad thing. The State is a creation of a basic race; post-scarcity society should be evolved far past something as crude and undesirable as a State. Anarchism, specifically anarcho-capitalism, would be the way of things, not totalitarianism.