Fair enough, if you believe western propaganda the situation is already pretty dystopian. Does a room full of people providing mechanical energy in the face of shortages and being paid for it, more or less dystopian than a room full of people who are simply staring at the walls slowly starving to death?

Is that more or less dystopian than the folks I've seen in India breaking stones with a hammer into small piles of gravel?

I get that none of it is necessary in a world which is over flowing with wealth except that it is locked up by the .1%. Do you think Marx or Lenin bought into a communist state where there even was a 1%? As an engineer you work with what you have, not with what you imagine could be, in the hope that you can move the situation forward into something that would be more to your general liking.

So yes, it would suck rocks if the only work you could find in a city was providing motive force for elevators when the power was out. The only thing that would suck worse than that would be that you could find no work at all in a city and were considering a life of crime to avoid starving.

Also reminiscent of Black Mirror.