When my mother got pensioned, she engaged in local community clubs and projects. I think people can create meaning in their life, even if you remove the obligation.

I don't think all jobs will ever go away. But if you can ensure proper living for all with only a small percentage doing work on their free will, then I think it can be pretty good. Also I want to add, not only Star Trek shows a world with other distribution of goods, the Culture series of british author Iain Banks is pretty cool. And it has AI.

No, you are, because you dismiss every society besides the brutality of capitalism. This has not to be the way we do it. You just can't imagine being freed of the shackles of capitalist society. That you without thinking jump from jobs to houses shows how deeply ingrained this is. Why is having food, shelter, ... a life is connected to having a job. Why must that be? Read back of utopians back in the 19th century with industrialization taking off. A lot envisioned a world without work with all the productivity gains. Yet we didn't arrive there, because the productivity gains were used to enrich the already rich and not to improve the life of everyone. See for instance Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward ). Back in 1888 he could envision a world you cannot.

An interesting premise. But let's look at the example. Who would decide how many houses to build? How the house would look like? How big it will be? Who decides who gets what house?

Currently all of that is determined by the market. What is on offer, what is the demand, for what price. Who is willing or able to pay more for the nicer house. 

If the selection of the house is decoupled from income, what other selection procedure will take its place? Would it mean a central authority would be the decision maker of who gets what house when? I know Social housing exists, but not sure if that is a model to make everybody's life better. 

Borrowing from Yudkowsky's words, life should not always be made easier for the same reason that video games should not always be made easier, but that doesn't mean we can't eliminate low-quality work to make way for high-quality work. Eliminating subsistence work is emphatically not the same as eliminating all challenge, and arguing against Utopia using the prospect of endless boredom is more of a failure of imagination on our part rather than a law set in stone saying the future can't be fun or meaningful.

We can generate 3,000 times more electricity than we currently use by covering just 1% of the Earth with solar panels, by the way. That's plenty of energy to power as many robots as we feasibly need, and enough for *trillions* of AGI virtual workers even just using the limits of the current CMOS computer chip paradigm.

Sure some can. My mother could not handle retirement, she kept working until dementia stopped her, then declined fast without the routine.

I'm doing fine not working. I've created my own routines and live of savings. One of the 'benefits' for me of being Autistic is, I don't know the meaning of boredom, I'm easily entertained, not thrill seeking (the opposite) and very low maintenance. Maybe Autistic people can teach the rest how to live without work :)

Yet there's the saying "they have too much time on their hands" to explain bad behavior.

However society needs to fundamentally change to support a post scarcity / non 'working for a living' society. And those in power aren't interested in such a world. @haxxiy Why aren't we covering 1% of the Earth with solar panels now? Instead of dumping 1.6 trillion dollars into AI so far, we could have already solved the energy and food crisis instead. Well maybe not, here's what AI has to say about that :/ Covering 1% of the Earth's surface with solar panels would cost roughly $200 trillion USD just for materials. With installation, land preparation, and grid infrastructure, the cost would exceed $600 trillion to $1 quadrillion. To put that in perspective, the total global GDP is about $100 trillion.

However just $13 billion has been invested in Nuclear Fusion last year, it's going up, yet compared to 1.6 trillion in AI... Plus another 1.5 trillion war budget...

To get to a post scarcity world we need nuclear fusion to work to power the road to covering the Sahara desert in solar panels. Desalination plants and water pipelines to solve the clean water shortage. HDVC transmission lines to distribute power from where the sun is currently shining to where it's needed. Hydrogen fuel cell technology for transport. More efficient farming, not wasting farmland on bio ethanol. Promotion of healthier, less destructive proteins, get people off beef. 1.58 billion cows (and bulls) are a huge driver of climate change.

Agriculture is the second biggest greenhouse gas emitter (12.3%) after energy (76.7%)
https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas-emissions-countries-and-sectors

The tasks are all clear, we don't need AI to tell us what needs to be done. So why are we wasting all that capital on AI which is only making problems worse in the short run. One thing that doesn't have an answer yet is where are we going to put all the excess heat from more electricity use. Unless it's solar power, electricity use dumps more heat into the environment.

Plenty mega projects civilization desperately needs, AI isn't one them.

Well, for starters, even with business as usual, in the next couple of decades we're likely getting another 10x cost reduction in solar energy from economies of scale and learning-by-doing alone (a conservative estimate given past trends in photovoltaics), so that brings our BOM down to "just" the size of the US's GDP.

Not to mention that the full automation of labor would be a step change comparable to the Industrial Revolution while percolating much faster throughout the world than it did. The economy's doubling time, GDP deflator-adjusted, would be in the order of just a few years, so enormous infrastructure projects such as 5.1 million km² of solar panels would become much more doable on relatively short notice.

Also, to think this used to be a thread about Crazy Taxi and SEGA...

Would rather it was done with a tool that doesn't need a data center. Aren't they working on AI that can run without data centers?

It also helps that Godot is open source, which means that all the big models had the whole Godot engine source code in their training data.