Well I missed the entire flame war it seems, but my own opinion is divided. As an ardent supporter of capitalism, I will be the first to say it won't last, just like every system. Over time things change and we change with them. Most of manufacturing is becoming more and more automated as is, and let's not forget the idea that 3D printing may actually change manufacturing forever. Ultimately simple repetitive tasks will be automated, let's not kid ourselves. I just recently read that Singapore is going to introduce robot taxis. That's the sort of thing that would replace humans right there.

We aren't too far off from that day. But at the same time, robots and associated things are still plenty dumb, and then there's the entire notion of security with so many robots wandering around (imagine a hacker in control of an taxi?). Money won't necessarily be irrelevant. Why does money exist? Because there is scarcity in resources. We trade because of scarcity. Wherever scarcity exists, money, and by extension capitalism, will still work/thrive. Let me put it this way: if we can build everything with robots but we still need a power source to do it/power is scarce, then you need trade/money. That being said, we are nearing the ability to create systems that will be fine tuned enough to give everyone enough. Charlie Stross had a book called Accelerando that dealt with similar ideas.

Society itself would be fairly different at that point. The hard part about speculating is that we don't know of what would've happened at that point. Say if population shrank a lot suddenly for example. So there are many unknowns in that sense.

I think in the next few decades the space industry could fill a large employment gap, this is reliant on a highly motivated population to kick start it.

Access to quality education has never been so important.

Also, as the modern era moves forward the quantity of existing creative media (tv shows / games / movies / music) increases and thus new media that doesn't push boundaries has a lower value. However, this has already been realized by the creative industry and they are taking steps to control content availability so backups are not kept by the average viewer.

I like to be wrong and welcome it, because it means any beliefs I held were wrong and I can be corrected via healthy debate.

TL;DR.

Maybe you'd like to try that in a couple of sentences.
You sound like one of those Basic Income nut jobs.
Work for your money.

This isn't a post about basic income, though that may be how you want to frame it. I see basic income as another form of mandated welfare, and there are some problems with that such as, who pays for it? where does the money come from? How does that effect inflation? Basic income is more of a poorly conceived patch to address the inevitable slide of a capitalistic economic system, where all of the wealth gradually trickles upward to the owners of the businesses. A capitalistic society necessarily depends on the whole population having capital which can be spent to purchase consumable goods by those who produce it. Every time a rich business owner collects money and doesn't spend it, it takes that money out of economic circulation. As they get better and better at extracting money from the rest of the population, gradually there is less and less money remaining to extract. Basic income partially addresses this problem. However, you're still looking at this from a capitalistic framework and value system. As I hinted at in my original post:

"In our current worldview and value system, that's kind of hard to comprehend and respect, but that could very well become the norm in the future".

There is a good possibility that once capitalism itself becomes a deprecated economic system, currency itself will be a moot point, so the idea of basic income would be nonsense anyways -- Basic income in a non-capitalist economic system makes no sense. However, for the proponents of basic income, it would be interesting to feed that policy into the real time simulation to see what the long term effects of that policy would be. My prediction? It just continues to feed the rich and ultimately becomes unsustainable as unemployment gradually rises to 80%.

A few of your premises are immediately identifiable as wrong (although you are right insofar as some things will inevitably change in the future).

The world population is certainly not growing at an exponential rate. It is growing at its current rate because there is enough food produced (... by the capitalists). Ironically, the regions where population growth is biggest are not hte biggest producers of food (they're actually among the smallest). The people in the regions where population grows fastest only survive because they are being fed by the others. They produce more children and cry for help, and get more food. End capitalism, end this feedback cycle, and it all collapses.

I think a Logistical Curve would be a better model for population growth, which does have an exponent in it. Our world has a human population carrying capacity, and we're rushing towards it. The carrying capacity is determined by our ability to grow food, provide homes and shelter, and by our ecological health (more pollution = lower carrying capacity). The scary part about the carrying capacity is that as we begin to reach the asymptote, more and more human beings will suffer as we all barely get by and survive. But, none of that has much to do with the problems of a capitalistic economic model. You would have the same problem in a non-capitalist society. One interesting observation is that as a society goes more "modern", the birthrate declines substantially. Japan currently has a crisis where the birthrate vs deathrate is negative and population is declining. Is this the fate of all modernizing societies, or just something particular to japanese culture?

Fewer people being needed to produce goods is a truth, but there are more (useless) goods than ever produced. Also, the "idea" that the people who think they can shape tomorrow have in mind is that humans shall no longer do the robot work, but will do the creative stuff. That's somewhat utopic because 90% of the population is just too useless for that, but if the automation trend continues, things will will eventually have to go in that direction.

It is however not certain that the automation trend goes on with the same speed forever. The extrapolation from "soda" via "burgers" to "everything" may not hold.

I mostly think that we human beings are ultimately creative people and need to creatively express ourselves. We need a creative outlet. I think *this* is the core reason why games like Minecraft thrive: They provide a creative outlet for people and a means for people to share their work with others. People don't necessarily have to be skilled artists, and the definition of "art" can be a lot more loosely defined as a "creative outlet" rather than the traditional art we think of. But hey, even if people decide they don't want to spend their life exercising their creative needs, they can spend that time doing other things, like spending a majority of their time with other people, or going on nature hikes, or consuming entertainment. The question is, what do you do with your abundance of time if there is no work left to occupy it?

The assumption that production cost is linked proportionally to salaries is not true (it is true within some bounds, but not alltogether), as is the assumption that you will be able to buy e.g. a large TV for $1. Even now markup is huge already (and has been for decades), the cost of production is a tiny fraction of what you pay for goods. It depends, on some goods (say, milk) it's only 50%, but on some goods (books, CDs) it's easily 1,000%. When you buy the newest "GPU Pro" book or such which costs you $75, do you really think the authors get much more than $2 from that, and that it costs more than $5 to make the actual book, altogether? Note that the Kindle version which doesn't include a physical book and has no additional "production work" costs almost the same (8€ difference here).

I'm not so sure about this. Imagine that you can produce a 52 inch television screen for pennies (or some commodity everyone wants). You've completely mastered the resource supply chain and production by automating every aspect of the resource gathering and production of the television set. You could make ten million television sets at extremely low cost. Let's pretend that you do this for ten years, and you've saturated the market with your high quality television sets. Pretty much everyone and their uncle has one now. If you're in a capitalistic society, you'd want to keep selling television sets. Since everyone has one already, the available customer base will shrink very drastically. In order for you to continue making sales, you have to drop the price of your product. Let's say that you're also not alone: Every producer of goods has pretty much eliminated human beings from the production line at every step of the production. That means you don't have to pay anyone, but that also means very few people get paid. Unemployment is 80%. If you want to sell a television set to the average consumer, you'd keep dropping your price until most of these unemployed people can purchase one. If it costs you pennies to make a television set, and you sell it for a dollar, your profit margin is still 50-90x the production cost.

Regardless of what happens in 50 or 100 years (that's an awfully long time to forecast!), people will still have greed, so money will be needed, and people will have to be able to earn money. People will still want to identify themselves as "something better" in comparison to everybody else, which doesn't work if everybody is equal, or if nobody owns anything (or if everybody owns the same).

Capital greed is meaningless in a non-capitalistic society, but there are other ways for people to distinguish themselves as being better or above someone without comparing economic status (just look at the social dynamics of a high school). You'll still have celebrities and people will still crave attention and social validation, which could turn into the new greedy pursuit.

Hodgman touched barely on a topic I want to expand on: BALANCE.

Markets are self regulating towards balance. People keep laughing at this idea because Adam Smith introduced the notion of an "invisible hand" which was like a benevolent God that made everything workout. And history proved him wrong, but he was right that markets are self regulating. It's just that it doesn't work they way he thought.

The problem with self regulation and balance is that they are amoral: If I grab a bowling ball, take an elevator 12 floors to the rooftop; gravity dictates the ball will try to find balance by falling to the floor. It may take a thousand years until the building begins to decay and crumble until finally the ball falls (or an animal grabs it). Eventually, all things that go up, must go down.

But here's the thing about balance: If the ball falls from the roof down 12 floors, the Law of gravity doesn't care if there just happened to hit a passerby and get his skull cracked open at 60 m/s. It also doesn't care if a children was there seeing the whole thing and getting traumatized. Gravity doesn't care. It won't move the ball to avoid hitting any passerby. All it cares is about balance. The best we can do is blame the guy who took the ball 12 floors through the elevator and irresponsibly left it there.

Again, it could take a thousand years for the ball to find balance. But it will happen.

Same happens with markets. Thousands of irresponsible greedy people that don't measure the consequences of their actions leading markets to a state of imbalance, until the balance eventually happens: leading to massive inflation, massive job layouts, and/or business getting close, etc.

But this isn't a problem of capitalism. Every system that works with a human component is prone to abuse due to lack of responsibility or moral values.

The ultimate goal of capitalism is to produce goods with as little cost as possible and sell them for as much as possible

This is blatantly incorrect.

Capitalism is a form of leaving where wealth is determined by the accumulation of something we call "capital".

It just so happens there are irresponsible greedy people who want to accumulate a lot more capital they'll ever need to live a life full of incredibly excess. Producing goods at the lowest cost and selling them for as much as possible without thinking of the consequences just happens to be a highway towards that egocentric goal.

That's not a problem within Capitalism. It's people. If we look at Socialism: the ones controlling the State (and their friends) happen to live considerably more comfy than the rest, even though this is not what the system dictates. I've heard Meritocracy being pointed out as the solution, but it has the same inherent flaw: replace "capital" with "knowledge". Those with lack of moral values but who are knowledgeable will try to amass it for themselves and deny it to the rest, in order to hold more power and live more comfortable lives. Same with anarchy: some people will organize themselves to gain advantage and try to oppress others so they can live better.

Anarchists believe "some day" mankind will be evolved enough for everyone to be kind for others and when that happens anarchy will lead to an utopia. The problem is, if mankind ever reaches such form of evolution, then any system (Capitalism, Socialism, Meritocracy, Anarchy) will work just fine.

3. The world is becoming increasingly globalized, such that multinational corporations can have business operations in multiple countries. Manufacturing is done in parts of the world where it is most economically efficient, where labor is cheap and ecological laws are lax. Sales are conducted online and the transaction takes place in countries with the most generous tax laws.

You're assuming it will stay forever like this while the rest of the capitalistic world crumbles.

China is already struggling to keep this unfair competitiveness that is key to your idea of capitalism failing. China has imposed restrictions on the acquisition of USD for their inhabitants and specially to foreigners, strongly watching and controlling the USD / CNY exchange rate. They're artificially causing the imbalance because it benefits them. It can't stay like that forever. When balance strikes, their economy will be shaken, and so will the rest of the world.

Not to mention, many countries are taking steps towards protecting their economies from this unfairness. Some violate WTO regulations, some operate within its limits. Not every government watches idle.

6. The "work" people will do in the future will skew towards work which just isn't economically feasible or possible to replace with robotics or machines. If a coke machine can dispense soda, then a machine could also dispense cheeseburgers. If McDonalds can figure out how to automate hamburger production down to a machine, they would... provided running the machine is cheaper than paying a small staff an hourly wage barely above minimum wage. 95% of what few jobs remain will become service industry jobs (retail will mostly be replaced by online shopping).

Just a small question: if machines do everything that can be sold and nearly everyone's unemployed, where will the unemployed get the money to buy that stuff being sold?

If no one is getting money to buy, no one buys. If no one buys, prices drop and no businessman will even care to invest in those business and robots. They'll go broke.

If business are broke and people is unemployed... then what? Nobody will hire so nobody will work? Nobody will do anything? Everybody will just wait idle until they go famine and die?

But let's suppose we live in a future where everything is made by machines and given away for free. Your idea is sustained by the notion that prices will drop to 0 or nearly 0 because of supply; but such thing not only needs robots doing everything, it also requires unlimited supply of resources. This is wrong. Electricity isn't unlimited, gas, oil & fuel aren't unlimited, neither are raw materials, meat and agriculture.

so normally if we took our existing capitalistic framework / worldview and applied it to this future scenario, it would seem like a dystopia with a lot of doom and gloom.

Here's the problem with a gloom and doom scenario: it's also not balance. A perpetual dystopian state of affairs is an imbalance. It may last a thousand years, but it's destined to improve. Just like the middle age ended and the '29 crisis was averted, so will future crisis.

You're right we have a lot of problems (countries outsourcing to cheaper countries, robots replacing people on repetitive tasks) and we're reaching a point where a lot of current global issues are about to blow in our faces ("about to" could be in 80 years, 500 years, or tomorrow). When it blows up... people will suffer, people will die, few people will win. But we'll also recover. Some of us may not see through it, many will. That's just the cycle of life.

People have been calling out the end of capitalism and proposing alternatives for centuries now. Funny part is, these alternatives have failed where capitalism yet stands. It's proven so far the one that sucks less. Hybrids have also succeeded (i.e. capitalism with social policies in nordic countries)

Left unchecked, raw capitalistic forces certainly do trend in a direction that's ultimately harmful--and it *is* happening, *has been* happening, for decades. Globalism of the type that's incentive moving nearly all of the manufacturing jobs overseas began to route out the strong middle class America once had -- A worker could support a family, put a little money away, buy a house, maybe even had a pension. After manufacturing itself went, lots of industries and businesses followed -- first the suppliers of parts to those manufacturers, and then all the local businesses that once had more patrons with greater disposable income. Those fell, taking more of the middle-class. The very wealthy either pocketed the increased margins of reduced production costs (directly, or through investments), while for the very poor not much changed other than that their demographic grew bigger. The middle became a space occupied by significantly fewer people -- mostly now professional knowlege-workers like lawyers, doctors, engineers, computer programmers, or other technical professionals that were once held to be of the upper-middle or upper classes exclusively. Virtually no one in the new middle class does manufacturing or performs a trade -- some very physical jobs pay well, but are boom-jobs (oil fields) or seasonal jobs (heavy-construction), and often demand travel, extended hours, and are very often among the more dangerous jobs one could do. Basically, to be in the middle class today you either work with your brain (and you're very good at it), or you put your fortune, health, and life at outsize risk.

Capitalism probably is the best we know, but I think we got it twisted when we allowed ourselves to be convinced that its only function for the public good is to produce cheaper goods. What we were all sold in high-school civics/economics was the premise that capitalism's function was to allocate investments based on market-driven principles, and that rational consumers and rational producers would form a kind of crowd wisdom that would function to increase the quality of life. But what happened is that we took the sugar-filled path of cheap goods instead -- a quick-fix quality of life improvement that sold out the long-term prospect of maintaining the same standard. Much of the debt bubble we experienced was taken on by those who held onto that illusion for longer than was prudent, and facilitated by those in a position to profit from it. A kind of capitalism that worked for a sustained public interest by reducing exploitation and increasing opportunity would be great, maybe we can get there, but that's not what we've got.

What's really unfortunate is how enshrined this current kind of Capitalism is -- most people treat it as essentially beyond serious criticism or contention. Its heresy in some circles to even suggest that its something less than perfect, that its perhaps only the best we have so far. Its seen as unreasonable to point out those who it isn't serving, you'll be be told those people need to get with the program or should suffer. Its seen as unreasonable to point out those problems it isn't fixing, you'll be told that there's a business plan for every problem worth solving, and if there's no profit in it, the problem must not be that bad. Its seen as unreasonable to point out the inevitable end to this game, you'll be told that the rich deserve to become richer, and the poor to become poorer. You'll be told to ignore the millions getting poorer, and to focus on the tens and hundreds slingshot into the upper-classes by ingenuity or good fortune. You'll be told that exploitation and taxation of the lower classes by the upper classes is the natural order of things, and to keep singing its praises while you wait for the lottery to call you up into their ranks.

Another thing that fascinates me is that the general population genuinely believes they have no power -- surely the power balance is out of whack in favor of the producers -- but consumers are not without power. One thing you can do pretty easily is to start shopping more at locally-owned businesses and buying locally-produced goods -- I know that sounds like hippy-talk but in the long run its better for your self-interest to contribute to your own economic stasis than to give money to those who will send profits up the chain of command -- out of your community, your city, your state, and your country before it settles in some off-shore tax haven. You can do this by resisting the urge to buy new things to replace broken ones, and instead have the old thing fixed by a local service-person (obviously, there are circumstances where new makes sense). You can prefer to buy new goods that are designed to be serviceable rather than sealed, and long-lasting rather than disposable, or designed to become obsolete. When you shop at a supermarket or get fast food, you can refuse to use the self-check lane or automated kiosks -- of course they're convenient, but they wouldn't be there if it didn't mean the business could save money reducing head-count -- they're robot's like any other, and we know the trend will be to eliminate human positions as it becomes feasible and comfortable and normalized if we don't push back.

I don't know how confident I am that this will happen though. People are often apathetic, feel powerless to make a difference, and fail to read between the lines of corporate speak. Take the recent blow-up over a 15/hr Minimum wage, and the threats by the fast-food industry that they could buy a robot to replace a $15/hour worker -- the industry raised the specter of job-loss, people panicked "15$/hr sure for the jobs we get to keep, but most of us will loose our jobs!", and the boogie-man went back in the closet after a job well done. Virtually no one connected the dots that if they can threaten to do it at $15/hr now (and I've read reports that its not actually economically viable until closer to $25/hr), then its only a matter of time before they can *actually* do it at $10 or $12 an hour -- Will those same people then race for a decrease in the minimum wage, just so that they can keep their jobs? Some politicians already try to sell the notion that *today's* minimum wage is too high.

Hodgman touched barely on a topic I want to expand on: BALANCE.

...

The ultimate goal of capitalism is to produce goods with as little cost as possible and sell them for as much as possible

This is blatantly incorrect.
Capitalism is a form of leaving where wealth is determined by the accumulation of something we call "capital".

It just so happens there are irresponsible greedy people who want to accumulate a lot more capital they'll ever need to live a life full of incredibly excess. Producing goods at the lowest cost and selling them for as much as possible without thinking of the consequences just happens to be a highway towards that egocentric goal.

That's not a problem within Capitalism. It's people. If we look at Socialism: the ones controlling the State (and their friends) happen to live considerably more comfy than the rest, even though this is not what the system dictates. I've heard Meritocracy being pointed out as the solution, but it has the same inherent flaw: replace "capital" with "knowledge". Those with lack of moral values but who are knowledgeable will try to amass it for themselves and deny it to the rest, in order to hold more power and live more comfortable lives. Same with anarchy: some people will organize themselves to gain advantage and try to oppress others so they can live better.
Anarchists believe "some day" mankind will be evolved enough for everyone to be kind for others and when that happens anarchy will lead to an utopia. The problem is, if mankind ever reaches such form of evolution, then any system (Capitalism, Socialism, Meritocracy, Anarchy) will work just fine.

This is exactly what I'm observing happening. It costs $0.30 to produce a hair clip in China. Then it gets shipped to America and sold for $15. If it was possible to sell it for more than $15, then the price would be higher. If it was possible to produce the hair clip for less than $0.30 without sacrificing anything, then that would happen as well. 99% of everything you can find in Walmart today is produced in China and sold elsewhere in the world at 10x-50x markup. I still stand by my claim that the ultimate goal of capitalism is to widen the margin between production cost and sales cost to maximize revenues.

3. The world is becoming increasingly globalized, such that multinational corporations can have business operations in multiple countries. Manufacturing is done in parts of the world where it is most economically efficient, where labor is cheap and ecological laws are lax. Sales are conducted online and the transaction takes place in countries with the most generous tax laws.

You're assuming it will stay forever like this while the rest of the capitalistic world crumbles.
China is already struggling to keep this unfair competitiveness that is key to your idea of capitalism failing. China has imposed restrictions on the acquisition of USD for their inhabitants and specially to foreigners, strongly watching and controlling the USD / CNY exchange rate. They're artificially causing the imbalance because it benefits them. It can't stay like that forever. When balance strikes, their economy will be shaken, and so will the rest of the world.
Not to mention, many countries are taking steps towards protecting their economies from this unfairness. Some violate WTO regulations, some operate within its limits. Not every government watches idle.

TODAY chinese labor is cheap and that's why a lot of capitalists are relocating their manufacturing centers over to china. They don't care that thousands of people in other countries can't compete and thus loose their jobs. Like, it doesn't even register as something to be concerned about. They got their money, screw everyone else. If you look around at other parts of the world, you can already start to see some of the long term economic consequences of this: Italy. Spain. Greece. Balkans. Growing unemployment and a vanishing manufacturing center. A country needs fresh capital to flow in and out of their local economies, and ideally they're not operating at a trade deficit. China could very easily be replaced by another country which offers cheaper labor and less ecological oversight in return for labor. Minimum wage could be less than a penny, and capitalists would be thrilled. Wider margins! Follow the long term consequences of this to its final conclusion though: Let this globalized system run for a few decades and try to imagine the economic state of most countries. You think 18% unemployment in Spain is bad today? Hah, just wait, it's going to get much worse.

6. The "work" people will do in the future will skew towards work which just isn't economically feasible or possible to replace with robotics or machines. If a coke machine can dispense soda, then a machine could also dispense cheeseburgers. If McDonalds can figure out how to automate hamburger production down to a machine, they would... provided running the machine is cheaper than paying a small staff an hourly wage barely above minimum wage. 95% of what few jobs remain will become service industry jobs (retail will mostly be replaced by online shopping).

Just a small question: if machines do everything that can be sold and nearly everyone's unemployed, where will the unemployed get the money to buy that stuff being sold?
If no one is getting money to buy, no one buys. If no one buys, prices drop and no businessman will even care to invest in those business and robots. They'll go broke.
If business are broke and people is unemployed... then what? Nobody will hire so nobody will work? Nobody will do anything? Everybody will just wait idle until they go famine and die?

But let's suppose we live in a future where everything is made by machines and given away for free. Your idea is sustained by the notion that prices will drop to 0 or nearly 0 because of supply; but such thing not only needs robots doing everything, it also requires unlimited supply of resources. This is wrong. Electricity isn't unlimited, gas, oil & fuel aren't unlimited, neither are raw materials, meat and agriculture.

Yes, you're starting to get the crux of my argument against capitalism. If machines do all the labor, who has money left to purchase the produced goods? The capitalist reaction to a downturn in sales is to lower the price of goods. As long as the cost of production is lower than the price point, they're still winning.

The question is, what do you do when 80-90% of the people in the world are unemployed and unnecessary for the continued production of goods? Your farms are run by self-driving tractors and computer scheduled irrigation systems, and harvested by self-driving machines. A farm with thousands of acres could be run and managed by a single person. And hell, even the management could be outsourced to an AI system.

Electricity isn't unlimited, but its production could be done in such abundance that it might as well be. Just build solar power plants to cover a couple hundred square miles of the earths surface and you've got all the electricity you could want. Let all your vehicles be electric instead of fossil fuel based. What about mineral resources such as iron ore? Couldn't mining operations also be automated by AI controlled heavy equipment? If a job is relatively mindless and uncreative, it can be automated.

The age old model of a financial transaction and exchange of goods is necessarily going to become unsustainable when production costs approach zero. So, what do you do when you have an overabundance of goods and nobody is capable of purchasing them anymore? The system of capitalism has to change or adapt from its current model.

so normally if we took our existing capitalistic framework / worldview and applied it to this future scenario, it would seem like a dystopia with a lot of doom and gloom.

Here's the problem with a gloom and doom scenario: it's also not balance. A perpetual dystopian state of affairs is an imbalance. It may last a thousand years, but it's destined to improve. Just like the middle age ended and the '29 crisis was averted, so will future crisis.

You're right we have a lot of problems (countries outsourcing to cheaper countries, robots replacing people on repetitive tasks) and we're reaching a point where a lot of current global issues are about to blow in our faces ("about to" could be in 80 years, 500 years, or tomorrow). When it blows up... people will suffer, people will die, few people will win. But we'll also recover. Some of us may not see through it, many will. That's just the cycle of life.

People have been calling out the end of capitalism and proposing alternatives for centuries now. Funny part is, these alternatives have failed where capitalism yet stands. It's proven so far the one that sucks less. Hybrids have also succeeded (i.e. capitalism with social policies in nordic countries)

Yes, but it doesn't have to be that way. With a bit of prudent planning and societal & systematic reform, we can entirely avoid all the human suffering and backlash which is coming our way. We've been so conditioned by capitalism to believe that an 85% unemployment rate is *bad* that we have a hard time even comprehending that it could actually be a blessing. 85% of us suddenly have all the free time and resources in the world to do whatever it is we wish to do. We're no longer shackled by a 9-5 job to scratch out a living. All of the labor of hundreds of generations which came before us and sweated through work, and all of the advances of technological efficiency can finally be enjoyed as our leisure time increases to crazy levels. Nobody complains that the dishwasher and laundry machine have taken hours of house labor out of their week... neither should we complain when other aspects of our work are eventually deprecated and unnecessary.

My $0.02 ...

Not a single communist/socialistic/marxist/'some other name' has ever lasted very long.

Historically, dictatorship/monarchies/'divine right' are the longest lasting continuous governments in the world.

The problem with your thesis is that *all of human history* has been predicated around making work obsolete, yet we've seemed to have no problem finding new things to do. Creative jobs and research jobs have increased as manufacturing and food production have decreased. Why will "robots" suddenly break that trend?

Furthermore, this isn't so much an artifact of capitalism so much as it is an artifact of technology. Civilization has always strived for efficiency. This idea of jobs being sacred is a reactionary thing that always fades with time.