Most of my sense of self comes from overcoming obstacles, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree with that sentiment. I'm all for automation and AI doing the grunt work, but I don't want to live in a zoo. We should take the benefits of automation and continue to struggle and exert ourselves, and seek out greater challenges than we could before. Automation as an escape from work? I'll pass.
Well, that's the status quo.
> Most of my sense of self comes from overcoming obstacles, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree with that sentiment. [...] Automation as an escape from work? I'll pass.
You would be welcome to work as much as you like, of course. Obstacles would be self-selected, not assigned by chance or force.
If you live in my hypothetical utopian society and truly feel that humanity must suffer so that you can derive meaning from "the struggle", you might have to emigrate to a polity of like-minded masochists.
People were saying the same things in the Edwardian era about progress solving all of life's problems. Then we started World War I to a large degree because people were bored and wanted stimulation. This is just another utopian prediction that won't come true.
The work we do is not arbitrary bullshit. Civilization takes work to maintain and grow.
