I don't want infinite leisure, I want to feel useful. A good day's work is very satisfying. But at the point machines can do my job better than I can, it might be difficult to feel useful.
"Don't worry grandad, I'll mow the lawn".
I would be really surprised if there was anything more then a fringe minority that found a sense of purpose from their job.
The problem would occur if I was unemployed and unemployable because my skills (or any new skills I could conceivably learn) were no longer valuable.
People already going through this now.
When machines can replace most of the low end labor it becomes increasingly unuseful to keep people in poverty. Imagine being one of the few megarich alive, being able to produce teslas like it was a SaaS business, amazing margin, great moat, but 99% of your fellow humans were on poverty not even able to dream about having a car.
There is always the technodystopian path, but to get there is not so easy either. You need to keep people relatively happy for long enough that you have manufactured enough killerbots. Most humans want to preserve civilization.
The idea that your job provides for you is 100% fabricated construction that is great local maxima for this society. When technology changes what is possible we will reorganize the beehive of humanity to take into account that these new machines exist.
I think the term “emotional labor” might be a good tool to hint at what I’m talking about. That’s just a subset of the wider “there’s more ways to be productive than a capitalist job” view
This is all assuming that the intelligence explosion people are wrong. If they’re right… well, let’s hope they’re wrong.