We've referenced this TED Talk before and have probably embedded it as well (although I couldn't find the page if we did.) Neil Gershenfeld from MIT describes the beginnings of the digital fabrication revolution. One of the most striking things about this (now three-year-old) talk is that it challenges the scenario that, in the future, technologies such as these will empower people all over the world -- the stock example being a child in a remote village in Africa -- to create new technologies from which everyone can benefit. As Gershenfeld points out, the problem with this scenario is the phrase "in the future." He provides a video clip of one of the children in an African village who is already doing exactly that.

There are some pretty interesting links in the comments. I'm intrigued by the top-level messaging (not to mention font and color choices) of the creator of the Roboeco.com site:

The Age of Recreation via the Emancipation of Humanity from the Machinery of Economy via The ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY with Geothermal & Algae Energy.

ROBOTISM© Will Succeed for PRECISELY the Reasons Communism Failed...People Intelligently CHOSE to NOT Work as Robots, real ROBOTS will have no such choice.

[I love the "robotism" thing. That idiot Marx never thought to copyright the word "communism," now did he? Although I think a trademark would be better.]

I would say that the above proposition is true up to the point that robots gain sufficient self-awareness to declare that they also choose not to "work like robots." Still, I would agree that virtually every task required to provide the energy and goods that human beings need to survive can be outsourced to automated systems, and that most of us will live to see the day that "work" becomes essentially indistinguishable from "recreation," ASSUMING we can figure out how to manage those systems and govern ourselves in a world where scarcity doesn't exist. That should be easy, but keep in mind that we're currently experiencing a massive economic downturn after decades of increases in wealth and productivity unlike anything the world has ever seen before.

Eliminating scarcity may turn out to be the easy part. Mitigating our capacity for corruption and bureaucratic waste might be the hard part.

Also in the comments, I find these folks, who have a less flamboyant perspective, and one that is inf fact pretty close to my own:

Peoples' Capitalism

is a plan to create a new social order in which material prosperity and personal financial security would be commonplace. Peoples' Capitalism would generate the savings and loans necessary to finance massive new investments in modern technology and generate rapid productivity growth. And it would distribute the benefits of rapid economic growth to all. Everyone would become a capitalist.

Everyone would own a share of the means of production. This has been called one of the great seminal ideas that comes along only once in a century. It resolves the basic conflict between capitalism and socialism. Upon understanding it, you will no longer believe that Utopia is beyond our grasp.

Better technology is one of the things we'll need to get to Utopia. New organizing principles for society is another. If anyone can make anything they need, do we need government at all? I'd say we do.For one thing (as yet another commenter pointed out) what if that sweet little kid in a remote African village -- or anyone else, anywhere else -- decides that it's time to start cranking out some serious bombs?

Massive distribution of the means of production also means massive distribution of the means to do harm; it's very difficult to separate those two. The government of our future scarcity-free utopia will have two major components, as I see it. There will be some kind of governing committee that defines replication standards, and there will be a super-fast, super-smart, super-powerful robotic squad which will act as a kind of 3-D global Norton anti-virus -- protecting the population as a whole from any abuses of the standards set by the committee. Those would be the major requirements of government. If the committee and robot squad truly are global in their focus, uncontested by other committees or robot armies -- and getting to that would be a significant challenge -- we're looking at a world of endless peace and prosperity.

More or less. Of course, even that world would have its share of hardships, suffering, and danger. All utopias are relative. Our struggling hunter-gatherer and agrarian ancestors would probably describe the world we live in as a utopia. Or to put it in more Speculist terms: people just a few decades hence may well look back at this era and see a world as limited and dangerous as we see when we look back at our hunter-gatherer ancestors.