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Are jobs good in themselves?
Either these machines are going to be so great that there is no use human labor can be put to that satisfies human wants (which sounds utopian to me) or there will still be productive uses of human labor to satisfy human wants (i.e. jobs).
You're a survival machine, your sense of purpose comes from overcoming obstacles impending your survival. Maybe the machines will just take over and provide a stimulating environment of constant low-level warfare which is what we evolved for.
Who knows, it's possible. Maybe you're going to be turned into biodiesel, or reengineered into a better pet. Unknowable.
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The important thing is for our civilization to have an incentive to keep us around. Once we're superfluous, we'll be in a very precarious position in the long run.
Is being stuck in an old folks' home utopian?
For some (many? most?) people likely yes. The thing that is bad about being in an old folks home, today, is the "old" part. If I were free to spend my time however I wished at my current age, that would be pretty great!
And yet my experience with old people is that they fight tooth and nail not to be dropped at a home, and the ones there lament not being able to stay at their real homes or with family.
Preferable to dying in a street, but not what I'd call 'utopian'.
OK, but in a world where robots do all useful work there's no reason you couldn't be at home with your family! I took the point about the old folks home to be a concern about a kind of listlessness or malaise with lacking something productive to fill ones days with.
The biggest problem with current care homes isn't loneliness, listlessness or malaise. It's that the care home has almost no incentive to care about the wellbeing of its residents, especially those without vigorous younger relatives to advocate for them, and therefore generally ends up mistreating them for convenience.
The residents aren't paying, or if they are, it's usually their legal guardian using the funds on their behalf (people active enough to manage their own banking are generally active enough not to go into a home). The residents don't have the physical vitality to cause problems if nobody gets round to feeding them for a few hours. The residents can't leave.
One of my relatives was put into a rehab clinic for physical recovery after an injury at the age of 90+. When we went to visit him, we discovered him shivering in a frigid room. He hadn't been fed for a day, because nobody had got round to it. And if we hadn't visited, who would have known?
There are many, many ways for a rather overstretched institution to abuse people for profit or convenience without causing them enough damage for outsiders to notice, especially if they're frail and expected to die soon anyway. Presumably these places are inspected, but there are lots of ways to get vulnerable people to smile for the inspectors when you have them at your mercy for the rest of the time. It doesn't even require active malice, just neglect.
People are naturally concerned that the position of the non-robot-owners in a world where robots do all the jobs (and enforce public order) will be comparable.
If our robots do not take care of us as well as we would like then we are back in the case that there is productive work for human labor. If there is a gap between how we want our lives to be and what robots can provide why aren't we filling that gap (partially or totally) with human labor like we are today?
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Fair. Maybe a better analogy would be: You and your whole family are in an old folks home, and the country and all jobs are now being run by immigrants from another, very different, country. You fear that one day (or gradually through taxation) they'll take away your stuff and if they do, there'll clearly be nothing you can do about it.
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Precisely this. Does civilization serve man, or does man serve civilization?
The phrase "Disneyland with no children" comes to mind.
Civilization came into existence because it enhanced group survival.
It's pretty ironic that it's probably also going to end it. Once the deep state is efficient machines and not inefficient apparatchiks, things might get pretty funny.
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Being useful and free to withdraw your services is leverage. Having no leverage is bad in itself.
What is it you are envisioning needing this leverage to do?
Receive resources I need to live and thrive (and more, that I want but not necessarily need, besides) without having to physically claw them out of the hands of the haves (if that would even be possible).
A permanent low-status existence is also not ideal even if I got the material things. Status is zero-sum.
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