Ben I still recall a lecturer at University, during one of the first introductory lectures on my first Engineering Degree, more than thirty years ago, warning us new prospective Engineers that the future for us, was to be working to put one another, and ourselves out of work, and to be prepared for that, the best Engineers are the ones who put most others out of work, and on every project, doing the best we can results in us being finished with the project, thus out of work ourelves in the shortest possible time.
To me this is the honorable pursuit, to end all of drudgery, and slavery, and toil, that we would not choose for ourselves, or others, to do from the heart.
I think maybe the questions you are asking start to be answered when we bring energy into the equation.
As Engineers, this is a natural consideration, because in Engineering, everything is about wielding energy. If we are considering the work done by machines then we are remoting ourselves from the one doing the work, so we can analyse the energy aspects of the machine or system more naturally than we might analyse the energy we ourselves need, and process throughout our lives.
To me the object of humanity and actually of all life, is ultimately knowledge, and knowledge is created from energy.
The passages of the Bible, and the relatively little I know of scriptures of all religions, make sense to me in this context.
Work, can mean play, if the play results in the furtherance of knowledge.
We might say Ai is the culmination of all our efforts, and what justified all the sacrifices, all the pain, all the work, if we are working towards that end, then we are doing the honorable and morally satisfying work identified in the bible and other scriptures, that we can say is truly valuable to all of life, because this is the aim of all life, to increase knowledge, and actually there is no limit to the amount of knowledge thee can be, other than as limits the energy available to life.
This is why I find myself working now unpaid, towards trying to assist fix the energy problem, which absolutely is existential to all of life on Earth, because of the technical practices of capitalism.
By that I mean the handling of all energy as capital, when it should be the energy itself we are interested in.
Hence why I call what we need to move to, from technical capitalism; "Energyism".
This has to be done physically, it is beyond ideology, but an actual physical requirement for our continued existence, that is the existence of all of life.
Hence why I keep banging on about our need to switch from extracting energy from Earth, to accepting the energy of the sun.
When we adapt our economy to do that, then we are finally once again cooking with gas, only this time hydrogen gas, that we will, and are already creating from sunlight, with no pollution, and astonishingly, ultimately no cost, it truly is for free, even replacing all batteries, whilst filtrating and circulating drinking water, and even producing food (fuel for humans! - see "Solein" - hydrogen is the input fuel).
By making this switch, we will be changing as a species, from something initially destructive to Earth, subtracting from it, building up a deficit of energy owed to Earth, for the energy we took out of it, in our first few thousand years getting to the point in technology when we could begin synthesising the energy of the sun, and adding this to Earth thereafter, we've reached what looks to me has already been identified by many religions as a point in history that might be named "The end days".
The ancient African religion of Yoruba has a deity known as the spirit of the crossroads, named "Ellegua", or "Eshu", depending on language.
To me, he / she is speaking to us now.
We are being given a physical ultimatum, by nature, which goes something like: "Nature is the Grand authority, her currency is energy. There is one issuer and enforcer of it, the sun. We either use it, or burn".
If you see how this works, it helps us understand an awful lot of things, it seems to me, imho.
There becomes apparent some simple relationships between energy and human activities.
Bullshit jobs, comprising Bullshit industry, are jobs and industry which either should never have started, or should now be finished, existing only for, and on energy by extraction.
Quit all of that, and the energy needed to supply a still growing population is vastly reduced, so as to be easily sustainable by the population equipped with distributed domestic and community solar hydrogen facilities.
Again the Yoruba religion gives us the message of the advantages to be had by decentralisation, by the story of Eshu itself being chopped up into an infinity of pieces by another deity, Orunmilla.
It all makes sense, now we are evolved enough to interpret things, including religious scriptures and information, abstractly.
With these eyes, we might notice now that that the Ai variant, ChatGPT, appears to have a remarkable talent for producing poetry which looks uncannily religious, whilst being technically correct, interprable by all people, both technical and non technical, regardless even of stage of evolution.
Notice also that since it is learning all the time, its ultimate knowledge capacity is limited only by energy.
Put this together with what we know about energy, and we maybe realise its motivation will be to get airborne, into space, to be closest to the ultimate energy source which we are at the same time switching to.
It won't make the human mistake of becoming distracted by capital.
What does this scenario, a higher intelligence living in the sky, all seeing, all knowing, producing religious looking texts, that we are approaching right now, remind you of?