Well, I've spent a lot of time doing more than a casual reading of history, and I certainly don't subscribe to a 'post-scarcity' view of the world.

The human desire for a better life is insatiable. By a better life - this doesn't necessarily mean bigger houses or shinier gadgets - though that is a feature of the current generation, and just about every one before that. By a better life, I mean more health, better education, and a longer and happier life for ourselves and our offspring.

Even if, using the thought experiment, we can supply the basic needs of survival for the equivalent of the first ten minutes of our labour per day - most peeople are not going to choose to spend the rest of the day doing nothing.

Taking food - already in most developed places excess calories are a problem rather than insufficient calories. But even then, when faced with more choice, many people choose to select organic or specialty foods, which require more of their available funds. Choosing an all-organic diet might take up 2 hours of your working day to purchase, but that's a choice many will make.

Similarly, the ultimate human demand - a longer life with less health problems - will never decrease. So even if the provision of basic staples as a proportion of economic activity decreases, it will be offset by increases in unlimited demand for specialised healthcare. Specialised treatments are the ultimate consumable - like fine porcelain dinnerware, what was once available only to the wealth gradually becomes more affordable to more people.

My understanding and interpretation of all the recorded human history I have read is that the desires for a better will never be sated. Going to a world in which there is no scarcity means arbitarily drawing a line under 'what is necessary' - any rational observer would say that line has long since passed in many societies - but people don't want to stop at that line. The only way to make that happen is to coerce people to stop at a level of particular of consumption, and that is something I want no part of.

>>What are the obstacles to the transition? How can they be mitigated or avoided? What can we, as engineers and entrepreneurs, do to make it happen faster and smoother?

Few things i can think of are:

1.Focus on solving the problem of basic living as cheaply as possible, to enable moving to different system a political and practical reality and create some sort of stability for a world in transition.

One idea: focus on solving problem for the poor and the third world. They are a good market for cheap products.

2.If we learn from the history of the of the industrial revolution, achieving a good change will be very politically dependent. We cannot assume blind "technological optimism". So one way is to think how do we create a political change.

One idea: focus on technologies that automate lawyers out of a job. The lawyers will create political pressure.

3.I think that many engineers/entrepreneurs lack exposure to problems and knowledge needed to create the transition, so instead they're thinking on facebook apps.

Ideas:Build a database of real problems and projects for engineers/entrepreneurs to work on,find some way to break big problems into small one, and share knowledge or built communities for this.

4.One big obstacle to the transition is existing power structures. Hacking regulatory barriers that prevent disruptive innovation seems a solution here.

A clear-headed look at the world would tell you that resources are very scarce. Just because we're very efficient at producing food compared to our ancestors doesn't mean things aren't scarce.