Human Future: Life after total automation.

Please first start by watching CGP Gray's video on automating human jobs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

To summarise: There is perhaps no area of work that a robot will not be able to almost completely take over. Professional, creator, white or blue collar.

I'd like to use this piece to pose a few questions, to myself and any readers. Without too much delving into the background reading.

Should we fear being left without jobs?

Just as automation of a horse's work led to the decline of their population, the same will perhaps happen here too. Seen already in developed nations - the mechanism for decline here is perhaps similar in the long run to the decline that will come from automation.
I see that efficiency of work saves the need to use more people. When, in a developing nation, a mother may perhaps need additional children to guarantee a good income for the family unit, the same pressure is not applicable in eg. UK - the work each human can do earns the equivalent output of many less efficient workers. In a world then where one robot can do the work of many many humans, is the population driven up or down? It may appear that the poverty generated by the loosing of jobs would spur the population to improve as by the same developing nations mechanism of increasing number to secure gains.
The answer I have is that with increased efficiency comes greater economic output and on the same lines, (the potential for) greater quality of life for all its citizens whether in the form of benefit relief or health care and so on. (The side question here concerning the rising inequality and staggering gains difference between the top 1% and 'the rest' is entirely concerning in this futuristic example, but won't be discussed...)

We hope, and should (demand to) expect, therefore that the tendency of the improving general societal efficiency leads to an improved quality of life (qol) for all.
And as someone concerned with qol from a medical perspective this can only be a good thing.
Where this tendency leads now to the individual with no need to work for their income, for the state (no where near as well no it, perhaps 'collective' is a better word) to provide for each other, there will be no pressure on a human not to do what they want and when. Outside of the bounds of our understanding of universal law.
In that sense the next question is. If one had only to play all day. There was no work. Whatever one wanted was to be provided for, what is the point of life.
I should add the following points:

1. With personal communication already made very efficient, and the need for verbal communication becoming less and less apt, what is the future for social interaction, if any? One can find the answer to all questions in no time - why ask your friend the capital city of Europa is when Siri's great grandson will tell before you've even finished that thought. Catching up is as easy as a Skype call.
The point is then, why do we communicate and build physical personal relationships? I mean, cynically if       not for the enjoyment we can get with better communication then does that just leave sex and physical intimacy? Please tell me if there is anything else one cannot do over the internet already (not withholding any dreamed of advances in the future). If we cannot totally replace sex and physical intimacy, and if there is still a want for these then perhaps the bedroom is the one space where efficiency is rejected.

2. What would be the point to life. Where everything is easy, travelling is easy, communicating, enjoying oneself and indulging fiction - where everything is accessible and where your wildest dreams are possible instantly, one would surely have run out of things to do and become bored perhaps literally to death long before the medically limited age is reached?
Humans hedonisticly adapt; they get bored of things that they used to enjoy. And when one is 'ruined' by mass fantasy early on what is there to look forward, to strive towards and savour. Perhaps the reason the best meaning for life I have found myself accepting is the meaning of life is to simply enjoy oneself (and if you can, help others to enjoy themselves too). In that sense, we work, we survive so that we can enjoy greater and better things in our life. I study, so to earn more money, to open more doors and experience more things I would life. The questions stands then that if one does not work for what they want, what is the point of life.

I should like to interject with the best example to the contrary I can think of. Humans are interesting creatures. As I am not a zoologist I cannot say for sure if there are any other animals who make their ow lives harder for the seer fun of it. My example; growing one's own fruit and veg. Why do we bother with window boxes and allotment patches when the stuff in the shops is better (if you shop in the right place), cheaper financially, spatially and horologically. I cannot rightly anticipate why, just that we do and enjoy so. We like a challenge despite the perhaps evolutionary disadvantage? There may be hope then that a future life in those greater buildings in the future you can find pictures of will be one of relaxing (if there is relaxing when there are not stressors to relax from) and there are challenges and spiritual/self satisfying rewards.
Perhaps there is some solace in knowing one would never be able to design a building as well or build a birdhouse as nice as a robot. (Arguably pieces of music and literature would still, although perhaps not as good as what a robot could produce, present the emotional relateability of knowing a human sweat over this work).

3. An interesting aside is that happiness/health outcomes and relates itself your standing of the social scale. Are you better off than your neighbour, your husband's brother etc? Where everyone has everything they want, is there still equality or not? No. But when human time is now literally worth nothing would be not all be equal in that we serve little to no purpose now, other than personal satisfaction?

In conclusion though - I hope this very short dip into this has opened some ideas for you as much as it has me. A few conclusions:

1. I think that humans actually do need some struggle in their lives - to a) make the relax time more proportionately rewarding and infrequent, b) to bring to oneself the vulnerability that founds the emotional connection between individuals c) fulfill an evolutionary want for further understanding of mechanisms.

2. I do believe that human society is tending and will tend towards greater wealth distribution and inequality, for NOBODY's overall proportional benefit. Checks will go in place to reduce the effect, but I think (and will need to think more to clarify to myself) that one's happiness is related to how much better of (financially, personally, even down to the most trivial of things) than others they are up to a point - where one has any difference others will always be jealous of it. Grass is always greener etc.

3. Where there is unlimited resources to sustain a population and very little selection pressure one should think how they would spend their time - what would their life mean?

But the biggest questions is perhaps, when people loose their jobs in this faster pace of automation where to they go until we get to the utopia of burdenlessness. Does the quality of life increases for the whole population (if the 1% do not skim it off) reduce the poverty they face? And in that case, how many professionals need to be automated before we get to a functional level of nobody working? I think the answer if far fewer than we think. A state wage is not far away and with actual, positive progressive socially liberating and educating policy we can get a world where nobody needs to a) work and b) struggle unnecessarily. The question is, is this a world we want - and what would we do with it when it happens?