An age of enlightenment would likely ensue with so many free to pursue interests. Education would be transformed.

But who would be a doctor, nurse, barber, fireman, police officer or prison guard? When everything you want or need is available, how can you motivate people to do jobs that are time-consuming or carry risk? If everyone chips in we lose expertise. Maybe you could have a similar thing to national service, you are trained up and do say a two-day week for ten years? But brain surgery requires a huge personal time commitment. But what else are you going to do all day?

The deeper need is to feel worthwhile, such endeavours would be formally recognised by society in say annual awards.

First of all technology should meet us half way in those areas too. Afterall, technology is what would allow for a society where people can focus on their own creativity and interests. If it is advanced enough to do that, it would be advanced enough to make these other jobs easier too.

And second; there really are people, even today, which do these dangerous and more challenging jobs not so much because of money but because they love the challenge of doing it.

In some of the jobs you mentioned there is an attraction of being able to directly save lives, or help make other people's lives better.

In fact, I don't think that even today the attraction of money is bigger than the attraction of the job itself, with these kinds of jobs. Even money grubbing people have their limits. They usually want easy profits, not when they have to risk so much for them. So the people left doing these risky jobs are the ones who really want to, more or less.

And with advanced nanotechnology, even their job gets easier.

i think ur right and it is inevitable that there will be a no money system. You can see technology today how it is taking jobs away from people. Eventually technology will take so many jobs away that money will be irrelavent and the goverment will have to make a new system because so many people will be poor. I think this will happen in the next 100 years. Do you agree?

They wont become poor if technology is doing any good. Rather I would say they would simply exchange their job for something more interesting and rewarding. If this doesn't happen then something somewhere is screwed, and this isn't technology itself, but the way the system handles it.

Money will cease to be important not because no-one will have it, but because everyone will be able to have whatever they need without it.

I recall as a kid this was HUGE when "robots" were being put into the auto factories. the automotive workers were afraid of being "replaced".

The problem with that arguement is, like charging nothing for software, it doesn't ELIMINATE jobs, it moves them. For every gear assembly man that was fired, a robotic repair technician was hired. Some of the automakers even trained the FORMER assembly guys to do this.

Giving away software doesn't "take money" from the system, it takes it from a single place. For every dollar MS isn't getting, some small business is leveraging a LAMP stack and making a bit more money than she could with only proprietary tools.

The "we're being replaced" mentality is a side effect of technophobia, ignorance of the underlying technology, fear of change and a lack of control over technology.

What we're seeing is a shift from a physical society to a data society. When we think of WHY we work (food, clothing, shelter, entertainment) we see why we HAVE to work. But when the capability to have food and shelter is as guaranteed as the ability to have gravity it's not people being POOR, in essence, it's the exact OPPOSITE.