I think humanity has to fundamentally change too, but also that could happen as a reaction to widespread automation. People of high social status won't want to give it up. Over abundance studies on rats have...not been promising. In those studies the social hierarchy actual becomes more important, as rats start denying access to food for other rats in spite of their being more than the entire colony could eat. A lot of science fiction stories deal with a kind of "stuck" world that looks a lot like that. I'm reading a good one right now, "The Book of The New Sun.", that has a good line about it. Two guild members have just had an unpleasant interaction with two members of the relatively idle ruling class, and as their walking away the younger tradesmen says something offhanded about how the ruling class serves no purpose in the modern set up, and their existence is just evidence of undue dogma. The other tradesmen, a librarian, says "What purpose do you imagine they served in the ancient past?"

I don't think that's a foregone conclusion, but as others on this thread have said we would need a huge shift in societal values. And the problem is that antisocial people are a lot more likely to doing something extreme when we see society shifting to more pro-social values. We are seeing this across the world right now, and its far from the first time. A couple years ago I got into an argument with my aunt about Steve Jobs, because she said I had to respect him because he worked hard and made a lot of money. I was like, "fuck no I don't, his product has made my life demonstrably worse. Now my boss can contact me at any time, and as a person with ADD, having to carry around a work phone is like a recovering addict being forced to carry around an altiods tin full of oxy. It has made my life demonstrably worse, and the social, financial, and literal energy that went into it could have been better spent elsewhere. I don't HAVE to respect him, and I would never tell you that you HAVE to respect anybody. I chose to respect people who align more with my personal values." This argument went in circles for like an hour with my just trying to say making money alone does not make a person respectable. I told her she was free to disagree! but I wasn't going to concede on my position. She couldn't just drop it (well partially because were both stubborn oxen) because its important to her status that everyone thinks that way. That's going to be a huge issue.

And we do also have to recognize that it's not just antisocial people who might be a little bit squirrely about such a shift. There was a good SMBC about this recently. A man is praying and asks "God, why did you make it so man most toil on earth?" and gods like "Are you fucking complaining? Your kinda ugly, your voice is weird, and you make a low humming sound compulsively when you're anxious. SEE! Your doing it right now! If you didn't have above average pattern recognition skills and hadn't trained yourself to pay attention for frankly abnormally long periods of time, you would be a social pariah. You should be thanking me!" Yeah it's a joke, but I think that's a consideration to.

Screw pipeline, I got two words for you: DRONE. BLIMPS.

To add to this, lookup "earthships". There is a ton of valuable energy in human waste, in both the form of fuel and fertilizer. There are plenty of ways to recycle water while preserving the valuable parts (and not dying of dysentery).