[aiisahik]

"Couldn’t we develop technology in a way that serves the human interest in having labor be a good part of life?"

You can go farm rice or wheat by hand - is that a good part of life? You can ride a horse to go to work - is that a good part of life? You can use an abacus to do your accounting - is that a good part of life?

We don't want to go back to these things because we simply grew up in a world where were no longer values those activities as 'work'. We valued other things like memorizing ailments and legal doctrine, like typing computer code out one character at a time.

I think this argument about technology removing the joy of work hides the fact that technology has no interest in your joy for your work. It only has interest in the economic value of that work. You can continue to do the same work for joy - the only difference is you can no longer derive economic value from it. Basically if you enjoy being a translator that's great but maybe you will only be able to somehow do it as a hobby. And of course that's deeply unsatisfying for us because humans want to feel needed and useful. But this 'useful work' requires two parties - not just the one doing the work but the one needing the work. By focusing on the needs of the producer, we miss the needs of the buyer who would rather buy the service from a machine. The loss of the producer is the gain of the buyer who can now spend less on the good and buy more of everything else.

Of course we still have classical musicians despite there being Spotify because there will be a niche for them. And so there will always be a niche certain people doing artisanal stuff. And you can always do whatever you want as a hobby. Technology and capitalism doesn't prevent that. It just serves the interests of the buyers as well as the interests of the producers.