I'm really interested in what you mean by this. Expand?
Communism has only ever been successfully implemented during the primal hunter-gatherer times as well as in ancient Sumer, which had a simple rudimentary form or socialism. Every other instance, mostly in the 20th century, it has been squashed and sabotaged by more powerful nations like America e.g. Venezuela, Cuba etc. or coopted by authoritarianism and despotism e.g. Stalin, Mao etc.
Your concern for material resources is notable, but capitalism constantly revolutionizes the means of production and in the backdrop of an open market society, the Material Sciences, both in providing new materials for production and tending towards more renewable, recyclable and environment-friendly avenues for disposal, caters to that. While there is excess, alongside that there are advancements in renewable energy and a gear towards cleaner products and efficiency, and you can observe the evolution of that by simply looking any one product in its first form, and the consumerism that you dismiss as wasteful is often the fuel that helps that mechanism along. And when I was speaking of innovation, I didn't necessarily mean government-led innovation so much as entrepreneurial capitalism, which is characterized by new products and forms of distribution and organization displacing older forms due to new knowledge and demand for high quality. There's a rationality to capitalism that just doesn't exist with other models. And as I've said, they're are usually programs and laws embedded within the society that cushion the extreme example you presented regarding the dying, diseased citizen.
Capitalism's foundations rest on consumerism and the insatiable greed and voracity with which we devastate the environment, both man-made and natural. It relies on wage slavery, in which the consumers are trapped in a vicious cycle of working long hours at jobs that are beneath them for a pittance, which they will spend on goods as consumers, goods they neither need nor really want. All the while the "wealth creators" earn absurd amounts of money, money which vastly overcompensates their contribution to society and skill-sets, whilst continuing to undercut their workers, avoid paying their fair-share of tax and push any negative externalities for their avarice onto the rest of us.
Capitalism is outdated, a model that was suited to 19th/20th century industrialisation, has only greatly expanded the wealth inequality in this world. A system where the top 0.1% of the world have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90% is a system that is broken, or wasn't designed to work for us in the first place.
The idea that automation will replace human capital is as old as the birth of the industrial revolution, and yet time keeps setting the clock back on the encroachment of such a reality. I doubt that the prospect of universal incomes the straight-line progression you present it as, but it's interesting to think about.
It's an old one but it isn't incorrect. Just because experts have been warning about it for a long time doesn't mean it's not going to become reality. The industrial revolution massively changed the workplace and shifted job-roles cottage-industry towards manufacturing/mining, the computer revolution changed the world even more and created IT/service sector jobs. Soon the AI revolution will shift the job role again, but this time terminally. AI/Automated technology literally has no limits and will result in lay-offs, redundancies and job-loss on a scale unprecedented in human history. It's why smarter nations like Sweden are already automating some sectors and preparing for the future. Watch this space.
