They Work for Each Other
It's society. They work for each other, Morty. They pay each other. They buy houses. They get married and make children that replace them when they get too old to make power.
If you haven't seen Rick and Morty, this is a quote from Rick explaining why the people of an artificial "micro-verse" go to work all day when, in reality, their entire existence is solely to generate some power for Rick's car battery.
What he's getting at is that society doesn't need reasons to exist. And, it certainly won't stop just because AIs are starting to produce more and more economic utility.
In fact, you might have heard that AI is going to take all of our jobs and we're all going to sit around and do nothing. Wow! Will we finally get to pursue our dream of being a painter? Or was it a musician? 1
Actually, this is not how it works at all. There is not going to be some "event" when there's nothing left to do anymore because the AIs do everything. Humans are never going to stop interacting with each other on a transactional basis. It's in our Nature. Outside of some physical merging-with-the-machine-type-event the likes of which are hard to comprehend, humans will never stop performing tasks for one another, and exchanging items for services. We fundamentally work for each other.
You look to your left and see a rebar-renforced concrete double-curvature arch hydraulic barrier. What do you do? You keep dragging your little sticks into the creek. The beaver doesn't care that there are other animals that can make better water-blocking dams. It doesn't sit around and do nothing because humans took its job. It's got a dam to build and by god it's going to build it.
You're digging out some caverns one grain of sand at a time. Passing it in a line to your team member ants behind you. You don't know it yet, but humans can excavate your entire life's work in an hour with a single shovel. But who cares that they can make an economically more efficient hill than I, the lowly ant, can? I'm part of this colony and my job is to pass this dirt to that other ant over there! I'm not going to stop just because some other thing can do it better. I'm not going to sit around because a human with a shovel took my dirt-excavation job.
People do what's in their Nature. They work for each other. And they pay each other money. Stop worrying so much and go along for the ride.
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If you aren't pursuing your artistic dreams now, you're not going to just because you have more free time. Trust me. ↩