Capital captures it
Nothing is abolished. The gains are simply owned by someone.
The least fantastical answer, and the one most consistent with how every previous general-purpose technology has landed. The machines arrive, productivity rises, and the org chart barely moves — because the question was never what the technology can do, but who holds it.
Marshall Brain sets the fork most cleanly: identical automation produces welfare warehouses in one country and post-work abundance in another, and the only variable is ownership. Martha Wells makes the same point from underneath, by giving the story to the machine — a SecUnit that is legally equipment, and whose deadpan account of corporate survey work is funnier and bleaker than either.
If you find the post-scarcity premise implausible, this is the pattern to read first. It assumes the technology works exactly as advertised and still arrives somewhere recognisable.
12 works give this answer
Metropolis
Workers below move in shifts, bodies synchronised to machinery they do not own. Above, the owners' children run races and stroll in the Eternal Gardens. Two entirely separate days, stacked vertically.
Capital captures itAD-014-CAP·BK·1968Start hereStand on Zanzibar
Corporate contracts, eugenics paperwork, advertising, tranquillisers, and a media environment engineered to absorb the attention of people whose judgement is no longer required.
Capital captures itAD-026-CAP·BK·2003Start hereManna
Two societies from identical technology. In one, the displaced live in windowless welfare dormitories on a fixed allowance. In the other, everyone holds a share of the robots and does as they like. The variable is ownership, and nothing else.
Capital captures itAD-028-CAP·BK·2004Cloud Atlas
Sonmi-451 works nineteen-hour shifts at Papa Song's dinery, engineered to want nothing else, sustained on Soap, promised retirement at twelve years' service. The promise is a lie and the retirement is a slaughterhouse.
Capital captures itAD-038-CAP·FM·2008Sleep Dealer
Mexican workers plug in and spend shifts operating machinery in American cities they will never enter. The labour crosses the border; the body does not. Nodes burn out the people who use them.
Capital captures itAD-040-CAP·BK·2009The Windup Girl
Turn springs by hand, or by elephant, because calories are scarcer than labour. Emiko was manufactured to obey, is legally property, and performs nightly for an audience that finds her manufactured obedience the attraction.
Capital captures itAD-041-CAP·BK·2009Start hereThe Unincorporated Man
Work to buy back your own shares. Everyone is incorporated at birth, their upbringing and education financed by shareholders who hold a permanent claim on their earnings. Most people never reach majority self-ownership, and the ones who do are a class apart.
Capital captures itAD-058-CAP·BK·2017Start hereAll Systems Red
Humans still run survey contracts, file reports, and cut corners on safety gear to save money. The AI does the dangerous parts and would rather be watching serialised drama.
Capital captures itAD-059-CAP·FM·2017Blade Runner 2049
K does police drudgery and files reports. Replicants farm protein grubs in the dust. The companionship is a subscription product with an advertising tier.
Capital captures itAD-060-CAP·BK·2017Start hereAutonomous
Work off the debt. A robot earns autonomy after years of service; so does a human, under the same statute. The book's argument is that granting machines personhood without abolishing indenture simply widens the category of who can be owned.
Capital captures itAD-065-CAP·TV·202186
The Republic reports a war fought entirely by unmanned machines and casualties of zero. The machines are piloted from inside by an ethnic minority legally reclassified as non-human, who serve until they die. Automation is the cover story for conscription.
Capital captures itAD-067-CAP·TV·2022Pantheon
Work, as a process. Employers run uploaded people as compute, throttle them when budgets tighten, copy them when demand rises, and bill clients for their throughput. The uploaded experience it as an unending shift they cannot walk out of.
Capital captures it