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There is a difference between less tedious busywork and having no contribution to your own upkeep. There is a reason there is a death spike shortly after retirement. It's hardly crazy to suspect we have relevant instincts here. The survival advantage is obvious.
We evolved from creatures that hunted in bands and were probably murdered by our kin shortly after we could not longer provide for ourselves. I'm confident in a post work society we can conjure up meaningful games to substitute for the drudgery of what is currently required to upkeep society. Tons of people today make their living in some way derivative of professional sports and many people generate a great deal of their identity from sports teams. Same for celebrities or entertainers. A lot of the economy has already been separated from what is required to survive.
I think we sometimes read to much into occasional invocations of lifeboat ethics (like the Inuit ice floe retirement home) or stone-age incidents of war crimes. There are Paleolithic graves that archeologists have found of obviously disabled people who were clearly cared for their whole lives.
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vs
Hmmm...
I'm describing a trajectory. As we've found ourselves more wealthy and able to automate labor we have gone from occasional cold indifference to deaths of those who can not contribute to willing to spend heroic amounts of effort and expense to wrestle 6 more months for grandma against nature. The callous world you scare yourself with is a fiction of your imagination.
"fiction of my imagination", "state of nature"; potato, potahto.
We are only a hundred years out from the state of nature in the west; swathes of the world are more or less still there -- I don't think we can take for granted that backsliding is impossible. Especially if we are postulating something as bizarre as non-human superintelligence.
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It provides a value that can be traded for what is required to survive. I think you underestimate the psychological impact of being wholly redundant and superfluous.
Somewhere between 40 and 80% of Americans are already not net tax payers. Being redundant and superfluous is a spectrum that all of us are on. There are precious few who if they disappeared today would break the system badly enough to cause a blip. We're a long way from when most people worked on the farm and had a tangible hand in their own survival. As far as most of us are concerned food production is already functionally automated. Most of the basic necessities are already functionally automated. Besides housing, because it's rivalrous, what it took too survive in the 1800s could be provided by the state pretty trivially and with a bit of focus for a couple years with minimal human input. It's just not the case that humans need to be on the beating pulse of survival to find meaning in their lives. We'll be perfectly find with whatever social hierarchy game we entertain ourselves with once our survival is guaranteed.
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