Is life without meaningful work meaningless?
As computers become more powerful and engineering possibilities reach an all time high, human labour becomes more and more worthless. Today of course, our societies functionality is still based upon human work, but with the current technological advances that are being made, it doesn't seem so crazy anymore to state that in a somewhat foreseeable future human labour could be completely replaced by robots.
Ignoring the financial impact this will have, and assuming that all humans will have the opportunity to live the life they want to life, does living without even having the chance to have any meaningful impact on the future come with it's downsides although you can do 'whatever you want'?
A lot of people are not willing to accept the thought that one day all human labour will or can be done by robots and technology, making humans unnecessary for the goals they want to achieve, just leaving them with the power to live their life like they could in paradise.
The end of striving, the end of living?
You could strive to be awesome at laying on the beach or teaching a child good manners?
In my opinion work which is only executed for survival should be a thing of the past in the future. I expect our phase, in retroperspective, to be similar to the industrial revolution in some aspects. People have also lost a lot of jobs in that phase - still, (on average) quality of life has only increased since then.
Its a big subject this, don't think my brain can handle it :)
One example, we don't need labour in 3rd world Countries and are sending robots down mines. I'm not sure those ex-employees will putting their feet up by the pool all afternoon.
Yes this is actually a huge problem. But the problem is not that those people aren't working anymore, but the problem is that they didn't get enough money to buy those robots on their own, which results in an increasing gap of wealth.