How do economies of scarcity transist into economies of abundance?

In an economy of complete abundance, the amortized marginal cost of any product
(and all products) is zero.
A good model of this is in computer software, where only the initial investment
of a person into actually coding the program is what costs, whereafter
everything is, to put it colloquially, dirt cheap. (This assumes that costs
like power, food etc are external)

In such an economy of complete abundance, there is one thing that will remain
scarce, and that is creativity. So, we can either try to reward creativity
by direct means, or let fulfillment be its own reward. If the economy of
abundance is isolated from any external factors, then the latter seems to be
a better thing than the former. See "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator" by
Kohn. And besides, in an economy of complete abundance, there is no natural way
of within that economy by itself, materially rewarding a person, except for
by artificially restricting everybody else. Hence, the reward, whether given
or natural, must be nonmaterial (e.g reputation, sense of creation, etc).

However, the software model is not a complete economy. The ideal assumption
that costs can be just "made external" and thus not dealt with is void;
programmers have to eat too. However, the points made will be of interest when
we discuss transitions to possible future economies where living itself is
abundant; that is, everything needed to survive can be done without effort from
any of the people who are living.[1]

Yet, given the progress of technology, it would seem that current economies
are transitioning, albeit slowly, into ones of abundance, by increasing
automation of tasks. Complete abundance can be reached when an effective
replicator[2] can be constructed, as well as its service equivalent -- probably
limited AI.

If left alone, the tightly wound loop of market feedback, when subjected to
this transition will result in an enormous division -- between idleness and
hard work, between riches and poverty, in one end caused by business leaders
replacing "refiners" (those who add value to any product) by simply taking from
the abundance economy in question, and on the other end by the people left
over to fall by the side.

One may argue that as the economy becomes more abundant, capital will matter
less, and therefore the unimaginable riches of the leaders will have no
practical value when everybody can use a replicator to get what the leaders
have -- in effect, the transition becoming one that "lifts all boats". This is 
in theory true, and suggests that[3], observing this, the leaders will try to 
raise artificial barriers to preserve the power that arises from the
inequivalence given by scarcity.
Publically, such efforts will consist of trying to convince the populace that
abundance must be restricted, either because broad abundance makes sophisticated
abuses of society simple (by holding people ransom with a nuclear weapon, for
instance), or because the amortized nature of the zero marginal cost means that
to copy is game-theoretically preferrable to produce.
One may observe weakly analogous strategies in software wrt programming
corporations and in various other businesses related to creative output, e.g
publishing.

The question then arises, will the force of transition be so powerful that
such attempts are bound to fail, or must we find ways of peacefully change
an economy of scarcity into one of abundance in accordance to the external
pressure given by technical and other factors?
It may be so that the economic change itself will make the restrictions
useless (and again, a software analogy can be seen in the perceptions of
"hacker communities" who hold that competition alone will destroy the
artificial scarcity attempts, and in corporations that try to enact the
very same kind of artificial scarcity under the label of security -- argument
one).
But if the preservers win and chain natural change, the result when the
pressure becomes too large may be very messy indeed. Therefore, let's see what
other possibilities exist. Such "managed transitions" may give a more smooth
change, benefitting the population more during "neither here nor there"
economies, as well.

An old suggestion, based on a document by Bertrand Russell[4], observes that
in an economy of complete abundance, work in the traditional sense does not
exist because nobody is forced to do anything. As the marginal cost is zero,
there's more than enough to go around. Therefore, given that end point,
we should gradually dissolve traditional work the closer we get to the
point of complete abundance, and this can be done by adjusting the maximum
hours in a work day according to current employment trends, the point being
that as abundance takes over, demand on traditional work will decrease, which
again prompts a decrease in the work day length so that more have to be hired
to do the same amount of work. This in effect distributes time capital, so to
speak, among the entire working population.

Another way[5] of distributing work is to use raw capital instead of time 
capital, and probably will not be considered as interventionist by business. As
traditional incentive comes from monetary need, the society should simply
provide a capital floor to every member of the population, taken from taxes
on business. This tax should be adjusted according to the transition towards
abundance so that the cost and profit of running a business remains roughly 
constant for those who change their methods in accordance to what the 
abundance makes possible, creating a competitive force on corporations to 
adapt while the population reaps the benefit on an equal basis.

-----

[1] Note that Kaczynski (sp) would say that any such society is a dystopia
where every being in it is desperately distracting himself with some surrogate
activities that never will be as "real" as ones where survival is on the line.

[2] That is, a machine that can reproduce anything that can be produced, or
as close to anything that can be produced that is necessary to provide a
sufficient material standard of existence to support everybody.

[3] ... assuming that those in power would rather preserve their relative
power than benefit the population at large. This seems to be true.
[Monopolists and kings as evidence of this? Yes.]

[4] "In Praise of Idleness", Bertrand Russell, 1932.

[5] This is denoted the APF solution here, after a work of fiction mentioning
    this method as analogous to a large permanent fund.