>What will happen to a society where every single person has their basic needs met by some form of automation, and nobody needs to work?

Those who control the "means of automation" (robot factories, power stations, etc) --let's say 0.01%--, will rule over the rest, in gated communities and closed enclaves.

A small percentage of the population will live alongside them, in B-rated residences, to provide them services that, either still need humans or are better done by humans (e.g. sex), or its considered "classier" to have humans do for you (e.g. cooking). Let's say that's a 10%.

The rest 90% will be left to rot in urban and suburban slums, develop their own black economy, and shot on sight when they dare enter the rich areas.

https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Slums-Mike-Davis/dp/1784786616

https://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles...

Read this scholarly work for an ever more disturbing description of changes and trends in LA:

http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/...

Or you know, where only a handful of people will live this way. In isolated, heavily guarded, areas. With tons of energy, food, toys, technology, medicine and the like.

And the majority will slave away and be harvested for work, organs, sex slaves and such.

You know, sometimes you need to provide a more realistic picture of the future (this is not totally unlike how people actually live in places like Rio or Russia for example, and even L.A. http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/...).

>While implying that the US is a totalitaian state will get you lots of up votes from insecure europeans, the word has no meaning if it encompasses the current state of affairs in America.

It would be convenient to keep the word "totalitarianism" forever connected with the very specific practices of Nazi Germany or, say, Stalin's USSR, and only those. Unfortunately the word and the practice existed way before and will continue to exist in the future. And there's not just a single form of it.

One can spend all his life between home, office, some cosy restaurant or cafe, friends house, and never understand anything that's going on in society at large, if he's so inclined. Especialy if he's on the upper echelon, e.g not a black, latino, native american, or "white trash", so he doesn't get to transparently see the structures of totalitarianism in a day by day basis.

From the militarization of police: http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americ...

to cities built for exclusion and closing down of public space: http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/...

to the privitazation of prisons (and the highest incarceration rate of the world by far, surpassing even Stalin's era Gulag percentages when it comes to blacks): http://www.amazon.com/Punishment-Sale-Private-Business-Incar...

to the dwindling middle-class (which is, when it exists, the real pillar of democracy): http://www.amazon.com/Servant-Economy-Americas-Sending-Middl...

Add mass surveillance, three-strike laws that resemble 19th century ethics, the concentrated control of mass media, constant external war, etc etc and you have quite a potent mix.

For further reading on the geography and political economy of California, I strongly suggest Mike Davis' City of Quartz, which is a series of essays about LA:

http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Angeles-Edition...

Warning for HN readers: the book is written in the same critical and class conscious vein as this article, so you may not like it.