Quite wrong.
Your personal motivation is not universal, and pitying anyone who is different from you is arrogant.
I have most of my life experienced good jobs because I am smart, well-educated, and I like to work. I’ve found much of that work rewarding. But I also realize that I’ve been very lucky – lucky to have been born into a wealthy Western nation with free education, lucky to have been born white, lucky to have been smart enough to escape my miserable family conditions. Many, if not most people, do not have my background and experiences; they’ve not got the the genetics, the education, the opportunities.
But all that good work-for-hire is not where my reward centre is located . Whenever I could afford it I took jobs related to social causes I believe in, even if they paid little, or even nothing at all. Nor is it material possessions, public applause, the promise of posterity, or social status. I don’t get my best rewards from external sources. Doing something well, doing it better, smarter, more efficiently (measured against my own efforts), paying it forward, making the world a slightly better place, those are the rewards that motivate me. That was @Lumpengnom’s point – motivation to work isn’t universal.
Life is so much better for me without being tied to a specific job for money. I am more productive and more creative when I am not obligated to do something in a specific way because of all the constraints that any job, even a fulfilling one brings with it, because the bottom line in work-for-hire is always money. Even for non-profits. And I don’t (inherently) care about money. I reject it as a measure of my own or anyone’s worth.
If you offered me free money without strings I’d take it. But I won’t stop working on one thing or another until I am dead, I will never just sit on the couch eating bon-bons and playing video games all day if I am able to do anything else; I don’t need to be forced into that or artificially motivated by money or status. This is how I am; I like making things, doing things, exploring things, learning new things, accomplishing things.
Machines can do specific things humans can do better. Some percentage of humans can do anything I can do better. I don’t care. Things I do for myself are meaningful, things I do for and with people I care about are meaningful. That’s pretty much future-proof. If any job I can do goes away, if my profession is replaced by AI, my self-worth doesn’t fall with it, because that doesn’t define me.
AI doesn’t scare me personally; I think it’s pretty exciting, it’ll allow me to do things which I can’t now do, and it will never replace me as a person in the eyes of the people who matter to me. It scares me in the greater scheme of things because I worry how humanity at large will screw this up; we’re not mature enough as a species to deal well with the inevitable social upheaval. But maybe climate change will get us first, or nuclear war; no matter how technologically inventive we are, we are also capable of great feats of supreme idiocy.
