[SeanAppleby]

Literally anything else.

Whatever makes them happy, petting their dog, having a conversation with their friends/family, make some music that one person listens to, literally anything produces more value for society than performing arbitrary unnecessary labor which could be automated for near-zero marginal cost.

We should divert that capital to something more productive, tax the process and kick them back a basic income to do whatever they want with. If what they really want to do is what they currently do at their job, whatever, they can keep doing it while supporting themselves on the basic income, but that'd be their uncoerced choice.

Most people are unhappy at work and only go because they are required to to survive. If our society weren't so myopic and steeped in puritan ethics this would be as absurd as asking whether the thirteenth amendment was going to be surely positive.

[pacala]

Work gives us purpose. There is no substitute for enjoying the fruits of one's labor. Working on teams anchors us socially. On the flip side, working for someone else with little agency and decompression time is not very enjoyable.

Between pointless distraction and work, most people will pick the latter, especially after a solid decompression period, in spite of the surface enjoyability balance favoring the former.

[jsjolen]

There's a lot of work that I want to do that I cannot be paid to do, therefore those are the things I would be doing with my time instead.

Being paid is not a substitute for enjoying the fruits of one's labour.

[pacala]

True. The point is that at a personal level leisure is no long term substitute for work.

On organizing work. Chances are that at some point you'll want to work on things beyond the scope of what you can accomplish on your own. Or want to have a larger impact on the world / other people's lives. The big question is how to organize the work of people at society level. The pay per work model has proven to be very effective and gave us the marvels of the modern world.

On the shadow side, the pay per work model has become heavily geared towards exploitation, as in exploration vs. exploitation. We are at a point where worker conditions in a BigTech warehouse, or as a mechanicized Turk, are meticulously quantified exploitation. At the same time, we find it natural to expend the energy budget of a small city to enable machines do large-scale exploration.

[tehjoker]

Not possible under capitalism. Work or starve modulo the welfare state is the order of the day.