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What happens when there is no more scarcity? When there is no economic demand for the services most people are capable of providing?
By the standards of two hundred years ago, America's "poor" enjoy a lifestyle which the wealthy of that day would envy. Warm homes in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, TVs, electric light, plenty of food.
Today, the US could feed the world, at the level of providing everybody with a bag of wheat or a sack of rice, and a plastic 5-by-5 hut to keep the rain out. The cost would be the American middle class being reduced to that level as well.
What makes you think that the future productive classes would enjoy having their standard of living reduced in order to support the unproductive?
Don’t necessarily think they would. But if the “productive classes” are 10%, 5% or 1% of the population, the equation changes dramatically.
Unless the productive classes want to kill off or enslave the others, they’re going to have to give them enough to keep them happy enough not to rebel.
Carry the logic of increasing productivity far enough, and at some point you produce nearly infinite stuff with almost zero human input. Intelligent machines have, at least in theory, the ability to completely replace humans in production and potentially even in innovation.
At that point there will BE no human “productive classes.” Only people “taken care of” by machines. Who might eventually wonder why they should bother to do so.