If you want a Star Trek future, the last people you should be listening to are Jobs or Disney: http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of...
Wow, that's frustrating. It's not communist, it's post scarcity! Why on earth would we still have capitalism (i.e. a system for allocating finite resources) when resources are unlimited? Once you can have anything you can imagine by walking up to a machine and telling it what you want, what would you be buying with money?
Communism, in contrast, is a different approach to dealing with finite resources. That is, if all resources were infinite we wouldn't need communism either.
Otherwise the article looks good, but I suspect if we really arrived at post scarcity and all that was forcing us to slog into the office was IP, there would be a revolution in short order.
The USA has a cultural heritage of expansionism. In the 1850's, losing everything was no biggie, you just moved to California and started digging. In the 1940's, losing everything was no biggie, you just joined the army and shipped out for the Philippines. But by the 1960's when imperialism more or less became untenable (see: the entirety of Africa), there were no more safety nets. America continued in its headstrong belief that no man needs charity, that hard work will provide opportunities for anyone who looks.
The rich always want to be richer. There's two things to do when a first-world country exhausts its own easily-exploitable resources: acquire more resources by force, or redistribute wealth. Otherwise the rich will exploit the only remaining source of wealth which is a country's middle-class.
Anything? I can have anything I want? My own personal Tal Mahal? One for all my friends? How about a full-size replica of Jupiter? Oh, and I's really love a Dyson sphere for Christmas.
Our current capabilities are immensely greater than anything dreamed up during neolithic times, but we're still unsatisfied. There is no reason to believe that further technological progress will change that condition.
There are still lots of reasons we need capitalism. As long as humanity has to clean toilets and take out the trash there will be people who will be willing to pay to not have to do that. But at some point we will have illuminated every single one of those tasks. At that point the gain we get from the rat race vs what it costs us will flip and people will be ready to trash the system. We're not there by a long shot even if people from centuries ago would have thought we are. I'm not saying this will happen in my lifetime or the lifetime of my great grand kids. But I'm confident it will happen eventually.
Post-scarcity doesn't happen all at once, it happens to different resources at different times.
There are a huge number of us slogging into the office for IP as well as the challenge of erecting artificial barriers in front of newly non-scarce resources in order to extract profit by imposing artificial scarcity on them.
So I have my doubts that the revolution would arrive in "short order" although I'm optimistic enough to believe it would arrive sooner or later.
Even in a world with replicators someone gets the penthouse, someone else gets the first floor. Someone gets the 1br apartment in Detroit. Someone else gets the beachfront mansion.
That's just one example of the things a replicator will not make less scarce.
Another is people's time. Want 200 people to make assets for the next Call of Duty game? Want them to all be talented? You're going to have to give them something. Probably money so they can try to get one of the more desirable living spaces.
Why would you like to make a next CoD? Because you think it's fun and many people would enjoy it. You know they want it. There are likely to be more than 200 talented people wanting to take part in making this game. For fun, because they like the idea, they want the game to be made.
In post-scarcity society you and others won't have much extrinsic motivators; the intrinsic ones would run the society.
Services. Goods aren't the only resource one pays for. Peoples time and energy will still be scares.
There would still be things to do of course. But they would be things that people want to do and wouldn't need to charge for since they no longer have rent or food/utility bills to pay.
If there were no more money and no more bartering, only the first group would stay in music and they wouldn't need to be paid for it because they wouldn't need money.
I expect things like real TV would go away because that kind of stuff is mostly to push advertisement and without money what would you be advertising?
I do this regularly. I rebuilt someone's Windows machine the other day in exchange for the fruit trees in my garden being pruned.
If you will, money is a message is a message passing protocol. I don't care what's on the other side and how the message (money) was generated - all I care is that I received a message (money) and then I sent other messages (money) to other actors in the network (obviously I sent back something in exchange and so do the other nodes). Then they generated their messages and so on. This way all I need to know are the nodes immediate to me to work it out. I don't care how complex the message graph becomes, it's all irrelevant to me and to others as well. If you don't have that then you have to broadcast all that you offer and all that you need and somehow create the graph to work it out all out. Money is a cheap way of abstracting all that.
Capitalism is primarily about generating profit, and there's no profit without money.
It all went downhill after the Enclosure Acts.
The lack of money involved just makes it potentially less efficient if the trade isn't well balanced, or potentially more efficient if they can avoid the friction of the taxman by avoiding money.
The same damn reason we still have capitalism now, when industrial productivity keeps rising to all-time highs each year! Because some people view human life as a competition for hierarchical rank, and believe so strongly in that vision that they impose it on the rest of us.