I agree the Star Trek way will never exist but please consider this; roughly the basic human needs are:
* Food/water/air
* Housing
* Clothing - actually not that essential, let's all go naked!
* Medicine - difficult, one for a later post
* Broadband Internet
Let me assert that we can currently produce enough food to meet the calorie intake of everyone alive. Let me also assert there is enough housing for everyone. There already is enough of everything, we just need to maintain it. Well actually there is never enough internet bandwidth but...
That aside, as long as we are prepared to do the work to maintain our current housing and as long as we don't grow the population we're almost post scarcity now. We just need to keep having the food, heating, (medicine) and then the rest is luxuries.
For food, I believe something like 10% of the population is involved in farming and this is a downward trend.
Heating/Lighting - yeah we need some advances in technology to get this one sorted but again I can't imagine there is more than 10% of society involved in energy production. That said for 1/2 my yearly take home pay I could buy a solar panel array that would produce more energy than I consumed. So if I put 1/2 a year's work into it I would have enough power to tide me through the rest of my life (discounting maintenance)
So we have massive gaps in things like transport and mobile phones etc. But we're not far off 100% robotised car plants and tech factories. It's certainly plausible that we could see it in our lifetime.I ask you what else is left in what humans need?
Well there's the service industry, there's design engineers, management, teachers etc; but, really once the basic needs above are met these are luxuries.
To briefly cover medicine, then there is plenty of historical precedent for people who do this voluntarily. Simple put, you could imagine a society where the drugs are mass produced in a factory and people in the community care for each other.
Let's suppose all this happened and maybe 15% of the society would need to work in farming, house maintenance, etc Who would do that?
ME! Somewhat naively I already grow a lot of my own food and keep chickens. From the farming friends I have, yes it is hard work but also very rewarding and were I not an engineer I could easily see myself doing it. Then maintenance wise I love DIY so I would still do that. So really I would love to be one of those 15%, so would almost all of my friends and family.
But what about everyone else what would they do? Perhaps many would sit around and do nothing, many would probably produce art, or maybe there's be engineers free to work on that new massively parallel architecture they have in mind. I honestly believe the service industry would suffer, so good luck getting your starbucks or McDonalds but if that is the price to pay for a liberated society I'll make my own coffee.
So yes I believe we're a long way off the society I imagine, but I don't think it's impossible and with the right willpower I believe we could reach within a few percent of it in our lifetimes if everyone wanted to.
But then any plan that starts with "if only everyone..." is bound to fail.