I've not given this much thought before, but right now I think viruses do about as much work as their chemistry is physically capable of?

(High school middling grades in chemistry and biology, so I may be way off).

Most their work is getting others to do their work for them.

Yes, indeed, but I still think they're "working hard"? Perhaps it's just a linguistics game though, what counts as "working" and what counts as "hard"?

I find it tough to describe something not really even living in some ways as "working".

Really? Huh. I do that all the time. My oven, my phone, even my travel pass would get that word (though I'd mean it in a different sense)…

Yes, but as you say, not in the meaning we discussed here.

Idk they travel like 100 million times their body length then sacrifice their lives in order to reproduce, avoiding hostile defenses many hundreds (?) times their size. I wouldn’t do that!

More explicitly, I think this a great exposition of my overall point. Humans need to worry about being successful humans, not fitting some Darwinian universal shape that all life conforms to, as the capitalists so often claim. Thus why I don’t think automating cashiers, truck drivers, and computer scientists is incompatible with human flourishing in the long term.