Obviously it is a ludicrous example, but there are books for this: The Culture novels by Iain. M. Banks.
I'd be quite happy as a citizen of The Culture.
But, on a more serious note, or more realistic, I find it vaguely insulting that you think that so many of us are just so shallow we'll not figure out how to live meaningful lives in an AI dominated future. The world is already meaningless. Some people live in the US, get tech jobs and live lives of almost indescribable luxury compared to someone born in South Sudan. There are beggars on the streets of most African countries, who are deformed of malnutrition and suffering in pain. There are children who will never know true happiness, and die in misery.
It's all fucking senseless and nasty, and as someone who originated from such a poor country it is infuriating to see spoiled developed world complaints sometimes.
We live, suffer, die. Some suffer less, some a lot more. We find out own meaning somehow, in this brief weird experience that we perceive as conscious life.
If an AI can bring a few billion 3rd world people out of misery, I don't think I'm going to shed tears if that means you have to somehow "find meaning" outside of a high paying tech job.
The worry “how will people find meaning with super-abundance?” has also me as tone deaf ennui of the already super-privileged. That we should be so lucky to have this worry.
> Some people live in the US, get tech jobs and live lives of almost indescribable luxury compared to someone born in South Sudan. There are beggars on the streets of most African countries, who are deformed of malnutrition and suffering in pain. There are children who will never know true happiness, and die in misery.
It's a bit baffling to me that folks think that the reason so many live in poverty now is a resource problem, and that an abundance of resources from AI would solve this problem. It is certainly a resource allocation problem, so I don't understand why folks believe that AI or our AI overlords will decide that everyone gets 40 acres and a mule.
I don't think most people care if it does bring a few billion people out of poverty, that's the point. They don't care either way, they just want their "meaning" (well paid US tech jobs) preserved.
> infuriating to see spoiled developed world complaints sometimes
Maybe glance back at your comment history and find you mostly are complaining about very developed world things and investigate why there might be a disconnect between these two aspects of you?
> If an AI can bring a few billion 3rd world people out of misery, I don't think I'm going to shed tears if that means you have to somehow "find meaning" outside of a high paying tech job.
Well, this is begging the question (how awful are people for worrying about the future when the future is going to be so great?), but you're also missing that there's more to humanity than surviving or not, and there always has been. There's no reason to reduce this to a dichotomy.