[marcus_holmes]

It turns out we'd have more time to be depressed.

If you hand the necessities of life to humans with no effort required, we get weird.

It's not that "work builds character" or any of that bull, just that humans don't do well when dependent on others. We need some sense of accomplishment and achievement. We may, in time, be able to separate these things from "work" and "putting bread on the table", but it'll take a generation of messed-up people first.

[qbiuvvdqbiu]

initially I felt the same: if one didn't have to work then all meaning to life would disappear, since most people's raison-d'être is to be useful to other people.

Then I thought, actually we've already moved from hunter-gatherer to farmer to consumer, all our basic needs already cost us much less energy and time than they did thousands of years ago. And yet we all still work, it's just most of the work is made-up.

All we need to do as the trend continues is invent more meaningful made-up work

[marcus_holmes]

I'm a huge Iain M Banks fan, and yearn to live in The Culture. He tackles some of these issues there, especially in Player of Games - the protagonist's attitude to game-playing resembles our attitudes to work.

But I don't think we can get there without going through a generation of pain and misery as we adjust.