[jMyles]

> Is the quintessential experience meant to be soulless and grating?

Of course not. Few things in life are more fulfilling than a job you absolutely love and are excited to whack at every single day.

But your question raises another one of equal stature: Is the quintessential experience meant to be a job? If we are creative enough to make rocks that can learn to do our jobs for us, surely we are creative enough to craft an economic model which allows us who no longer need to work to paint or write poetry or rebuild antique engines without needing to starve?

[Philorandroid]

I don't think a _job_ is the quintessential experience so much as _productive value,_ doing something that brings you joy from the act of creating, whether it's making music or art, assembling Lego kits, antique engine restoration, etc. Getting that satisfaction from your job is totally possible, so perhaps to some people it is!

As far as crafting a post-scarcity economic model goes, it's not the problem of dreaming one up, it's the pervasiveness of scarcity. Even if all of humanity's basic necessities are one day a given, scarcity won't disappear, just shift around (maybe as transportation for the otherwise-infinite supply of consumer goods? Or living space away from dense urban centers? Maybe even the kind of heuristic analysis abilities humans are unmatched in to keep the matter replicators functioning?)

More to the point, saying that this kind of luxury will exist in a thousand years doesn't nullify the concerns of the present, and probably wouldn't convince most people to forfeit their employment to machines likely owned by the uppermost classes.

[bumby]

I would argue there is a danger of conflating "productive value" with creative effort. The general view is that productive value is measured by how much a market is willing to pay for a product or service. I would venture to guess that most creative efforts aren't very marketable, unless your view is that society should go back to artisan craftsmen. Nobody particularly wants to consume the music that I create, so they have little to no procutive value, other than the joy I get from doing them. On the contrary, a lot of non-creative work has immense productive value. Re-shingling my roof isn't a particularly creative job, but I'm still willing to pay for it.