from a study of history, with its own culture and subculture.  No Utopia can be complete without one.

As for boredom, it exists to a very large extent already, if what we experience now is true.  What are the rich, powerful and comfortable doing when they actually know that almost half of the human race, at the current time, is surviving on less than $2 a day, and 20% on less than $1 a day?  AFAICS, the attitude seems to be (and this is universal in my experience across the rich and comfortable of all nations) is please **** off and die somewhere so its not inconvenient.  

In the past, perhaps owing to a lack of knowledge or information or education people did not actually know this.  Now we all do know it and there are no more excuses.

It simply cannot happen that way. A large part of what man once spent the entire day toiling to obtain...Food and Shelter...require very little effort, relatively speaking. Yet, there's other work and there are different tasks that we simply couldn't have ever predicted that were created in the absence of needing to devote so much time and energy and resources to basic survival. As man accomplishes more and more with less and less effort, new tasks and wants are created. It's not static. We don't run out things to do. Actually, when you adjust the lens a bit, you see that man actually finds more and more to do as he is freed from needing to devote his entire day to basic survival. 

How will it all play out? No idea. But it will play out in ways we could never imagine. 

social orders, helot classes like Manish suggests, clans, cliques, claques, all based on absolute bullcr#p items of conspicuous consumption.

Granted, I think there'd be a mix of people much like today: there'd be people who surrender entirely to sloth & depression, others give in to hedonism, but I don't think that would become the general rule. 

Instead, you'd have a few driven souls who'd be out exploring and inventing. You'd have artists, a few great ones and legions of pretenders more focused on entertainment. You'd have religious types, soul searchers. I think all of these would be a real minority, just like today.

I think the great majority of the population would be involved in the pretend economy. It'd be a little bit like modern America and a little bit like Paris before the revolution: patronage would be much more important, but fashion & accessorizing would be the thing. People would design earrings, iPad cases, duvet covers: creating all the paraphernalia of "lifestyle" would be the devotion of most everyone. Entertainment would be huge. Event planner would be a highly sought after profession. Celebrity cults and access would be huge. Much of life would be an endless cocktail party, organized by highly trained cocktail party professionals.

It'd be a little like Hunger Games without the starving kids, and a lot like Manhattan or LA. We'd become Hollywood. God help us.

We'd use the law to require work, just as we already do now with copyrights and patents.

Think of it this way, if we had replicators like Star Trek, the logical extension of intellectual property law is that the commands need to replicate a car or computer or whatever would be copyrighted.  Anyone who replicated a car would be subject to replication penalties because they didn't get Ford's permission before making a copy of someone else's car.

If we could live with only minimal amounts of work, those who make money off of other people working would use their dying breath to make sure that other people will still have to work.  Classical economic theory implies that when the cost to make something is 0, the price will also need to be 0, which means labor would have to be 0.  No one would know what to do, and that'd scare a heck of a lot of people.

We'd definitely fight several wars over it, at least in my opinion.

Not every good of value is manufactured. Land is finite and cannot be made. Good land, in attractive locations, is even more scarce. The planet has the same number of square miles as 10,000 years ago.

Also, the robots would extract resources... from where?

So the utopia you describe is not possible till we can manufacture planets, terraform existing ones, or invent warp drive to go to other solar systems. Definitely not a question of decades. Sorry!

. . .would hardly notice the difference.

.

that although you have abolished labour you have not abolished scarcity.

The Factories and Extractories can only extract and fashion so fast and people must discard befor materials can reenter the system.

So the problem of how to apportion the goods remains and how it is handled is path dependant - how we get to this state of affairs will haev  a significant effect on how it operates and so how close to a nirvana it is for most of the people.

I could imagine a few scenarios"

1. A small cadre of owners of the technology controlling access to the technology in return for services from the others. Since services have mostly become highly devalued only  a small number of pwople can live this way. They can then resell their access or the goods it brings them for services from the other unconnected outsiders. A heirarchy develops. Probably also a paralell economy where things get done the old fashioned way.

2. Goods are rationed. All have access to the ordering systems and a number of points with which to purchase what they want. Distribution of points could be completely egalitarian, or start of as based on pre revolution wealth. Either way heirarchy would still exist as people amass goods through fair means and foul. You could show status by saving your points to buy unusual and prized items - a cockatoo feather headdress for example. CFHs would be all the rage for a while and anyone who had one would be "it". Sporting events, entertainment and so on would continue and there would probably be distribution of prizes and awards. Society could control access to things it disapproves off by turning those options off on the order consoles. A parallel old style economy might arise to supply things like LSD, booze, midget hookers, etc

I feel a little depressed now.

Not everyone can live at the beach in SOCAL and someone has to live in Mississipi.

Is that an accurate rephrasing of your question?

If everyone is provided with the necessities of life, but not the luxuries, most people will still want to work (work being defined as something that you do for money that you would not do otherwise) for the luxuries. Some will accept a life without luxuries and forego work, some will work less than they do now, and some will work just as much. My suspicion is that most people will work just as much; for all intents and purposes, human beings have unlimited wants.

If robots and computers completely replace human beings so that no one can be productive in either a physical or intellectual sense, then human beings would essentially be living an endless childhood, with all the wonders and terrors that childhood composes.

but I doubt that the human condition will ever reach such a point, and I try to avoid hypotheticals as much as possible. What you're talking about is Star Trek, where basic necessities are covered and people live their lives for self-fulfillment and to maximize their potential.

....I suspect that it is made (or would be made) moot by a) the primate need for hierarchy, which means that we'll be competing over something or other and b) the transference of labor towards whatever is least efficient in terms of automation or most constrained in terms of resources.  A) is impossible to get around, B) will generally be difficult to get around short of a truly perfect and utterly costless production technology.

And considering B), does that even make sense?  You'd really be talking about production with no inputs whatsoever.  Short of that, there has to be some arbitrary level of consumption at which a resource constraint bites.  If there are enough suits of clothes to cover everybody's back given the expectation of one new outfit per month, then what happens when somebody wants two new outfits per month?  Or disposable daily clothes built to taste every morning by the nanofabricators.  Or...

The Eschaton/Utopia would be no constraints on human will whatsoever, but this truly implies no resource or energy constraints whatsoever, else your desires must run into mine in one resource constraint at said arbitrarily high level of consumption, even if we assume no ethical constraints.

Edit:  Looking further down in the threads, it sounds like you're not talking about a true lack of constraints, really just a continuance of existing patterns for a little bit.  I'd suggest that what you'll see then is a continuance of what you see in current patterns of behavior.  That is, it is difficult even today not to have enough calories to survive or to have a handful of outfits of clothes. (Yes, I'm saying that between income, charity, government supports, etc, it is difficult to literally starve or freeze, short of mental illness.)  So what do people do?  They compete over better/more exotic food, or over the ability to eat as much as they like without negative effects (either via drugs, surgery or interesting ways to exercise.)  Or accepting that they have whatever they want in terms of food, they compete over something further up the ladder.