What will a 'Post Scarcity' society look like?

Reply to Eric Wintjen Regrettably, I don't believe that we are going to physically escape Earth. The distances are just too great for actual interstellar travel. We have a spaceship already, namely, Spaceship Earth, which can carry billions of people for generations to come. Or so we hope. But it's up to us to tend it and manage it and right now, the powers-that-be don't seem to be doing that.

So 'coping with an abundance of luxuries' is, I would think, rather a parody of what I think we will be coping with in the very near future, which is massive food shortages linked to over-population and environmental degradation. As for 'materialistic hedonism', there's plenty of that already.

Sorry to be so glum, but that's how I see it.

Quoting Eric Wintjen

Eventually we humans will extend our reach beyond Earth and we will have access to more resources than we could ever consume in a calculable amount of time, as technology progresses we will be able to be able to harvest those resources with ease.

This scenario is the basis for quite a few science fiction novels -- some of them very good novels. But it's fiction, not science.

It takes a tremendous amount of energy to escape this kind-of-small-planet's gravity well. It takes a great deal of energy and time to escape this solar system. Our one pair of solar escapees--the 2 voyageur space crafts--have taken 40 years to get past the edge of the radiation flowing outward from our star into interstellar cosmic radiation.

Novelists solve these problems by discovering escape hatches on earth that lead instantly to other places (worm holes) or they discover novel materials and energy sources that have eluded actual scientists. The Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson is a good example of magical discovery. It's a good 3 volume set. I enjoyed it. It's a mix of hard science fiction and politics. The immense material success of the Mars society is perfectly fabulous. Fabulous as in totally impossible. (The technology is the impossible part; the politics are all too possible.)

The fact is, barring the appearance of a convenient worm hole to someplace really nice, we're stuck here.

Quoting Eric Wintjen

How will we as a civilization cope with the abundance of luxuries and lack of demand for any un-educated or unintelligent workforce? How do we prevent our civilization from ripping itself apart with workers revolts without halting technological progress?

Technological progress is not our most pressing problem. The biggest threat to our future is a failure to build a civilization which facilitates meaningful lives for its workers and their families (who are 98% of the population). No one chooses to be uneducated or unintelligent, so one must assume that they were forced into that condition by design or neglect. If workers rip a civilization apart, chances are that the civilization had become an oppressive hell hole for the benefit of the 2% who are not workers. Such a "civilization" deserved to be torn apart.