>All of human desires for competition and struggle would still be catered to.

Maybe. This discussion is a little abstract, but if OP is proposing a system where there is an outlet for ambition that lets crazy people push themselves to raise themselves above others, then I have no qualms against that. The problem is that such a system is going to look a lot like capitalism or some sort of market-economy (maybe with a social welfare state). That is, such as a system is going to to look like either our society, or it will be a disaster like Venezuela (in the extreme) or Argentina and Brazil.

You point me to a past, or present society that is a model for what OP is trying to argue for?

Obviously I don't condone this.. but a good example would be White Slave owning society in the United States pre 1860.

Most of the "labor" on a plantation was done by slaves which will be very similar to the automated labor provided by robots of the future.

But those slave owners still had jobs to do, they were still competitive with each other. They still used money and tried to acquire more wealth.

Sparta was a neat example too. Menial labor was provided by slaves, but Spartan Citizens competed with each other for military honors and societal placement.

>a good example would be White Slave owning society in the United States pre 1860.

Wow. Ok. Setting aside the humanitarian disaster that the South was in the 1800s, here's some qualification to your example:

- The South was poor, much poorer than the North, both in economic and technological advancement.

- The vast majority of Southerners were NOT slave owners. Meaning that Southern society was extremely stratified with wealth concentrated with a relatively small number of plantation owners. So your example is more inline with a bunch of rich people hanging out together.

But your example does touch on the actual deep problem with automation. The Southerners that prospered under Slavery did so because they owned most of the capital (land and slaves), but the poor non-plantation-owning population still had to work to provide for themselves! Under a cynical (but realistic) views on automation, we expect to see owners of the automatons do great, but what of the masses? Bolting either UBI or increasing our social welfare state is not a solution, because redistribution of wealth is not the core problem (we know how to redistribute wealth - with plenty of examples from modern market economies with social welfare, to less-market/more-socialist attempts as exemplified by your traditional Soviet-style economies). The problem is we don't know how to run a society where the vast majority of people have nothing to do.