It's a nice picture of a possible future, but you have to reserve some skepticism whenever the story starts contradicting what appears to be constants of human interaction.
For instance, look at the online communities which have similar motivational incentives- no money, just "prestige". What is it like to be a member of such communities?
Even in academia, when times are good and the money is available to any credible researcher with a reasonable research project, how do they act to each other and what do they do to each other?
The fact is that "reputation" is a nice word for status which is always shorthand for "relative status" which implies a zero sum game for attention and recognition.
What do people do to each other within that kind of game? Because if you're my competitor and I can ruin you through underhanded means, then I come out on top. Don't kid yourself, making people smarter or richer does not allievate or even abate these dynamics.
How much of the bad things that happen in the world are because the poor are ruining everything for the rest of us? How much are because people with an unthinkable amount of money, post-money people, are behaving in anti-social ways?
Then there's the underlying, ultimate competition - the competition for mates. How is that going to be mitigated
in a post momey world? Do the current crop of post money people behave in a relaxed, egalitarian fashion or are they underhanded, status seeking, manipulative, competitors who stop at nothing to satiate their ever-expanding, ever shifting desires?
The REAL revolution that's so far out there in terms of thinkability is the one where science learns enough about why humans behave they way they do that they can control it and shape it. You know that that is REAL science fiction because whenever you hear someone say something like that, your imagination fills with visions of what a dystopia that would lead to.
The reason we have that reaction is because of the set of facts I was talking about in the beginning of the post- what people are like- post-money or not. The idea that people would naturally and robustly be inclined to act in reliably decent ways such that, say, we would not need a police force to stop criminals and terrorists from doing what it is they want to do, is totally unthinkable science fiction.
Even Gene Roddenberry didn't go there, except in episodes where he wanted to show what a false veneer any such society ultimately was.
That is all we know about humans and what humans are inclined to act like and that's the point. It's not a revolution if it's not revolutionary and making stuff for cheap is not a revolution, it's an evolution.
It's not going to take away the badness of the world or even much mitigate it, at least for people living in developed nations.
For people in developing nations, yes, it will be amaterial godsend and yes, that would be a huge and welcome event.