It seems like you’ve already made up your mind so I won’t bother addressing the other individual assertions here. It’s somewhat burdensome to go through them all. I’ll just say something about your general method though. It’s very easy to get wildly off topic with talk of the Soviet Union and the Romans while losing focus on the issue at hand. Those examples involve a whole swarm of complex socio-economic factors, and it’s too difficult to pin down what the root courses are. Correlation does not always equal causation, after all. People used to think that coffee was a cause of cancer. It turned out that many people were smoking in cafes at the same time when they had a coffee. Smoking was the cause, but you can see why people saw the correlation and thought “aha! it’s the coffee!”. This is the danger of loose holistic thinking rather than looking at individual cases and carefully examining them for counter examples.
As it stands, I don’t think you’ve really addressed my distinction between the (a) a system that takes away the need to work and (b) a system where people aren’t motivated to think. You keep lumping them together as if (a) neccessarily would lead to (b) and using generalities to link the two. I’ve tried to argue that they’re distinct systems and given a number of examples of where they don’t correlate. But apparantly these examples aren’t enough for you to at least reconsider the dogma that humans need a metaphorical whip behind them in order to be motivated to invent things?
Even if the examples I provided are only true in a few cases (in the world as it is now), if we consider humans as beings that are changed by their environment (which they are), then it makes no sense to consider unwillingness to think as something unchangable in human nature. If a lot of humans are unwilling to think right now, then we should be looking at what causes them to not think. What environmental factors can we take from those who do think, feeding those factors into the environments of those who haven’t found the motivation to think. Making blanket claims that we need to whip everyone (or most people) into thinking by giving them lots of work to do overlooks the complexity of human psychology, especially when examples can be given of other environmental factors which contribute.
My thoughts on a technological society: we’ll never achieve perfection (if such an ideal exists), so there will always be a need to think if we want to improve the world, in big or small ways. A world where labour is offloaded to technology isn’t a utopia, but it would free us to work on projects that really matter. Technology - in our control - has the potential to liberate us rather than enslave us. Unfortunately science fiction often paints a dark picture of technology. Panzer Dragoon Saga shows us the dark side of technological control. It could have done with more characters like Paet who use technology to willingly foster their creative thinking. The Paets of the world are out there, but unfortunately their creative energy is often wasted because they have to work for the Empires of this world, their talents used in the war between competing buisnesses and in the process squandering our environment’s precious resources.