If we can provide adequate resources to everyone without anyone doing any work, it would make sense to switch to an economy wherein we provide adequate resources to everyone without requiring them to work.
Capitalism is a very effective economic system when having goods depends on enticing people to produce them. It's not a system that sticks around once goods and services become fully decoupled from labor.
I obviously missed the boat on replying to this in time, but here it is, for posterity.
I think the belief that we'll eventually get to a state "wherein we provide adequate resources to everyone without requiring them to work" is wonderful, but unfortunately, unlikely to happen.
I'm sure this has been thought out by people much smarter than me, but I see two problems.
First, who decides what "adequate" is? At some point, a decision has to be made on what resources to allocate to a person. Here, in the US, we "let the free market figure that out", which, ideally, means that people are free to negotiate and enter into transactions as they wish, but in practice, is just another way of saying that the government doesn't intervene in decisions unless laws were very clearly broken, and even then, justice is not quite blind. In any case, aside from laws and regulations on what constitute a minimum level of support for people, we do not define what "adequate" means, probably because it's actually a really tough question. The communists, in theory, wanted to appropriate resources "from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need." Except the people in power were ruthless and corrupt and that system wasn't all that great at incentivizing people. Anyway, good luck with defining "adequate" and then getting people to agree with you on that.
Second, and more difficult, is that the people who control the means of production now will be somewhat reluctant to give that up in the future, so I'm not sure how you'll manage to produce adequate resources for everyone without requiring them to work if someone else still owns the means of production. If you seize the means of production, you're back to communism.
So, I think the main thing that utopian visions like this miss is the messy reality of human beings, that they're born with inherent inequalities and that those inequalities persist over time. Someone, or, probably a corporation, will own the robots of the future. That corporation will control enormously powerful means of production. There is nothing requiring that corporation to pay you for anything, nor for them to provide you with adequate resources.
