He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry, or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.

“Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.”

He agreed that the table was clean.

“Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien – no offense – alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my specialty… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but” – he slapped the table – “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”

“But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.”

“And therefore does not really signify anything on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested.

He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.”

“But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” – the man laughed – “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from anyway?”

(Iain M. Banks, "Use of Weapons")

AI will never be able to actually express and reveal my own self to my own self or to others.

That's what art _is_.

Sometimes, it produces something that could be aesthetically pleasing but that's a different matter.

And how it is monetised is a different matter again.

Guess who wins in a war where one side has killer drone swarms with thermal vision, and the other one doesn't?

The only way to win this fight is to embrace the tech and put it to good use, not to shun it.

The technologists have no qualms about encroachment on your space.

Someone has been watching Netflix.

As long as we have a choice.

Not that long ago you would lose your job because you refused to take an experimental vaccination that didn’t prevent transmission.

There are still blacksmiths today, selling artisanal products. I dont believe it to be any different with the advent of AGI.

What you don't get of course, is the economic benefit of previously.

It depends; if you do that job or career for fun, then keep doing it! If you do that job because you like contributing to society and not because you like the job itself, then find another way to contribute to society.

Even in a scenario where all jobs are taken by AGI (a utopia if we can get rid of capitalism and wealth, but a dystopia if the billionaire class is the only one that benefits), you could do something as profound as raising children, or something as social as organizing music and art festivals.

And where do you find the energy technology required for that to happen?

Hint: it's not on the radar, but if you account for several fundamental breakthroughs in energy production, storage and transport, and all that while having positive side-effects on Earth's ecosystem, within the next 50 years.