Via Instapundit and USA Today:
…the upside is that with robots doing the work, humans will get to be supreme beings of leisure (OK, not actual Supreme Beings of Leisure) living life as they please without, as Philip Larkin wrote, letting “the toad work squat on my life.” And even if the economic pyramid gets pointier, odds are that a machine-run society will be so wealthy that even the “unemployed” will seem well-off by today’s standards, just as today’s unemployed are unimaginably rich compared to the working class of General Ludd’s era. As Robert Fogel notes, prior to the Industrial Revolution only about 80% of the “working class” was able to obtain enough calories to actually work.
On the other hand, Larkin concluded that he wasn’t actually cut out to live without work. And maybe a lot of us aren’t. Work makes us feel useful; people who are out of work generally feel sadder and less valuable than when they’re working, even if they are just fine financially. A society where no one works is one where people will look elsewhere for meaning and identity — quite possibly to extremist religious or political ideologies.
It’s easy to think of work as a curse, but a reading of Genesis shows that work was part of the creation, God working and putting man and woman in the garden to care for it. The short lesson – work is an expression of who we are, hence Glenn Reynold’s thought that people might look elsewhere for meaning without meaningful work.