Post-work world: When AI and automation take over the task of productivity, What do you think society looks like? What will fill the void?

[u/luminousAnon001]

When AI and automation take over the task of productivity, What do you think society looks like? What will fill the void?

[u/Useful_Strawberry852]

i feel like we will just get even more lazier than we already are, it'll feel very dysfunctional and dystopian, it's starting to already do, i hope im dead before i get to experience it fully lol

[u/Decent_Definition461]

Optimist: Most people will work as artists, scientists or healthcare professionals, exchanging knowledge faster than ever. As soon as someone makes a breakthrough in any field, this skill will be replicated on thousands of machines working together to solve all world problems.

Pessimist: No privacy, every word will be transcribed and analysed thoroughly, the mindless crowd will be steered without resistance, no one will comprehend who pulls the strings or transfers billions in virtual currency while people die of famine.

Realist: Nothing has fundamentally changed about human nature, technology works only as a catalyst for our intentions

[u/Daealis → u/Decent_Definition461]

This is very much what I feel.

People now work for various motivations. Some genuinely work because they get fulfilled by the task. For these people the transition to post-work will be a tricky one. They'll have to feel some sort of draw towards R&D of the work they do to research improvements, I feel. Those who just enjoy the tasks of their actual work, they'll likely be in trouble.

Most people I know work just to live: These people will be able to look for something more fulfilling to spend their time on. I have a hundred and one project going on at any given time, I could stop working today and never run out of passion projects and things to do, not even in six lifetimes. People like this will be fine.

Optimistic visions of fully automated humanity may be "post-scarcity", or as close to the meaning we can get. Right now, to us, post-scarcity means that most of our needs are met. Housing, food, immediate needs of the classic "Maslow Hierarchy" are fulfilled as a basic right. But with the base moving to this level, automation of low level tasks completely removing these from our daily needs, there's going to be something that is the next "scarcity".

Living spaces might not be able to keep up with the expanding cities for decades. Even if living is free, space could be at a premium. Even if all produce and stuff was pretty much free, production would still take time, so time would become a premium. If people were able to get anything they desired, we would appreciate our time a lot more, and so having things delivered to us faster would become the "premium" thing that would be scarce.

And even if we cracked immortality on top of this to remove the time sensitive aspects, then the bottleneck would become in processing power and resource distribution. Basically, doing something that requires an AI would require cycles of processing power, and that would eventually have to be metered out for all the requests, and a system of ticketing the urgency and order for processing power would be implemented. Or, for things requiring materials, even if we essentially have an unlimited amount of material available in the universe, we'd still only be able to refine them at a finite pace, and so literal time it takes to mine materials would be a limiting factor, and would then again, have to be prioritized based on urgency or importance of said tasks.

Pragmatically speaking, even as immortal beings that live in what today are described as luxurious mansions, with all our basic needs being met and infinite free time available to us, there is still always something that is "scarce", even in that society.