There hasn't been quite the flexibility and utter non-dependence on material livelihood that techno-utopians predicted, though. By some estimates, we've had something like a 50x productivity improvement during the 20th century. If you assume that in 1900 the average person was a subsistence farmer (a conservative assumption), spending 100% of their time to earn basic shelter and 2000 calories/day, then with 50x productivity improvement, someone should be able to get basic, 1900-style food/shelter by working only 2% of a full-time job, i.e. almost negligible work, only a few days a year. Hence the widespread predictions made by early-20th-c authors that by 2000, basic needs (shelter/food) would be essentially free.
But obviously that hasn't happened: there is no real route by which I can put in 2% of full-time work, which by productivity gains is supposedly equivalent to 100% of 1900's full-time work, and live a basic 1900-era lifestyle. If there were, a lot of homeless people would take that option, working one week a year and earning themselves basic 1900-era accommodations/food.
It's just not an option you can actually pursue. Heck, even if you want to take some of the productivity gains in quality improvements: let's admit you don't have the option today to live like a 1900-era citizen, but have to, at a minimum, live 10x better. Then I should still be able to live ten times as well as the average 1900 citizen while putting in only 20% of a full-time job's worth of labor, thanks to that 50x productivity improvement. But that isn't really an option, either. Instead it seems that, if that 50x figure is indeed real, the only way to realize it is to take the dividend as material wealth, living 50x better rather than putting in less labor.
The main reason it's not an option is because virtually no-one is interested in early 1900's style living in exchange for lots of free time. Most of the system's constituants want more, and to improve the lives of their children, so the system is not designed to accomodate the 1-week-a-year worker. It's hardly intentional- I can think of very few steady jobs that don't require at least a week just to get into the swing of things!
Now, if you worked at a good job that is actually 50x as productive (a waitress is probably not 50x as productive today as she was 100 years ago) I'd wager that you could work there for 1 year and live 1900's-style for the next 49, as I'm pretty sure 1900's-style subsitence farming is far more spartan than most people imagine.
But obviously that hasn't happened: there is no real route by which I can put in 2% of full-time work, which by productivity gains is supposedly equivalent to 100% of 1900's full-time work, and live a basic 1900-era lifestyle. If there were, a lot of homeless people would take that option, working one week a year and earning themselves basic 1900-era accommodations/food.
It's just not an option you can actually pursue. Heck, even if you want to take some of the productivity gains in quality improvements: let's admit you don't have the option today to live like a 1900-era citizen, but have to, at a minimum, live 10x better. Then I should still be able to live ten times as well as the average 1900 citizen while putting in only 20% of a full-time job's worth of labor, thanks to that 50x productivity improvement. But that isn't really an option, either. Instead it seems that, if that 50x figure is indeed real, the only way to realize it is to take the dividend as material wealth, living 50x better rather than putting in less labor.