Fiction by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I think more automation of the right sorts can be a good thing, but our society needs to move beyond a scarcity economics paradigm to an abundance paradigm for that to work out well for most people.
Sorry, but it's already been tried. It's called communism. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky -- they all made exactly the same arguments you are now making about Capital (machines) creating an environment of abundance, and how capitalism had buried itself, becoming outdated. It needed to be replaced by a more "realistic" economic paradigm, one of abundance. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Sound familiar?
As it turns out, capital didn't produce abundance. Scarcity still existed, resources could not, as a rule, be sufficiently distributed so that every man could be satisfied. There were bread lines, there were ten year waiting lists for shitty cars, there was corruption. As you state, resources are finite. Labor is finite. Even in a world totally automated by robots, the economy is fundamentally limited by its natural resources and the currently existing capital. In other words, scarcity. There is an interesting phenomenon in capitalism called "manufactured scarcity." New goods don't appear in the market because there is a need for them. They appear in the market because somebody wants to SELL them. They then convince you that you need them through advertising. Without this driving force, an economy goes stagnant. Innovation flounders. This is the reason that command economies don't work, and why no matter what Mr. Marshall Brian says about economic alternatives, he is almost certainly oversimplifying things.