There seems to be a contradiction in the picture of the world you're drawing. Humans deeply need to be needed by others, yet when all our problems are solved we will sit around alone consuming media? If we were truly in that situation, why wouldn't our deep needs drive us to spend our days with friends and family, pursuing creative projects, and inventing new problems to solve?
Sounds like your issue isn't with automation, it's with the human condition. It reminds me of this passage from Schopenhauer:
If every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty; in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is.
While I see some truth in this kind pessimism, I don't think it means that so-called utopia is necessarily worse than the world we live in today. I agree that human problems aren't going away, but I think we underestimate the potential value of removing the need to have a "job" to acquire the basic necessities for survival and the amount of suffering that causes today.
> Sounds like your issue isn't with automation, it's with the human condition.
Absolutely 100% not.
There is nothing pessimistic about my understanding of the human condition. I love that humans are this way: that our greatest sense of satisfaction comes not from infinite self-indulgence, but from strenous labor in service of those we care about. What could be more noble than that?
(Of course, I admit that I only perceive it as noble because of thousands of years of evolution where tribes of humans that cooperated were more fit than ones that didn't. But I am a human, and if I have to evaluate my value system using my value system, I'll choose to evaluate it positively.)
My issue is with systems that deliberately or as an unintended emergent property run afoul of human nature. Working well with human nature should be the ultimate goal of any tool or system used by humans. The things we build should help us flourish in all of the ways that our species has evolved to do best in. If a chair is comfortable on your butt, it's a problem with the chair, not the butt.
One of the constants of human nature is the ability to adapt to new environments. It could very well turn out that the 20th-21st century idea of a job is less well suited to human nature than whatever comes after jobs are made obsolete. Even if that's not the case, I think we are smart enough as a species to figure out how to navigate those changes and make them work for us. It sounds like you disagree with this, which is why I think your view is fundamentally pessimistic.
I am in top 10% earners in the world and I would love for more work to be still automated. I would simply ride a bike more, feast, dance and play and tons of other stuff like create own virtual worlds etc. Currently it’s hard to find to coordinate for these activities as work occupies lots of time.
If from this advancement we will be able to get 4 day work week and 4 day weekend it will be huge thing.
not everyone can resist instant gratification; not to mention the intelligence hurdle 'pursuing creative projects, and inventing new problems to solve' entails. i think both are true, that humans need to be needed but we're also wired to be 'lazy' and 'energy efficient'
