Turns out people rather like working, at least more than the alternative. Most jobs suck. I'm not hoping for or expecting a future without jobs; I'm hopeful for a future with better jobs.
Which is why we have what we have now - a few overworked people doing stupid hours trying to hold everything together, and a lot of underemployed / unemployed people who can't break in because they don't have the skills or proven track record required.
And that's when the battle begins. If I work a little more with more work available to me, I have a little bit more to spend. And spend it I will... Probably on housing. Now you can't afford a place to live, so you have to start working a little more so that you can also afford a place to live. And so on.
It is not a coincidence that women started entering the workforce en-masse at the same time automation was coming into its own. Previously there wasn't enough work for women to do, but once automation created an abundance of jobs there were some who started to take jobs. Once they did, soon all households needed both a man and a woman (generalizing for simplicity's sake) to have jobs to be able to afford anything.
But now we don't have another gender to help fill the void. It has been fascinating (albeit unfortunate) to watch people start to flounder as this plays out, and it will be interesting to see what happens when it all comes to a head as there is only so much work one person can do.
On the other hand, a lot of the work that needs to be done is stuff that needs to come from collective action (Replication crisis, aging infrastructure, global warming, cancer research, environmental destruction, food scarcity, etc.), which we don't seem to have much a a political/societal will for at the moment. And a lot of the work that people are currently doing seems rather pointless, or even having a net negative impact on society (soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, arguably almost all advertising, etc.).
It's possible that we'll end up as a society where a larger and larger percentage of the population will end up working parasitic jobs meant to leech off of the smaller and smaller percentage of the population doing actual productive work. Again, this seems to stem from the lack of political and societal will to try to allocate resources more efficiently.
Most people on HN don't have real jobs. The entire premise of venture capital is gambling that you'll be able to fund the next Facebook or whatever.
The reason that jobs would go away is more automation, but more automation means markets are more winner-take-all. And if more markets are winner-take-all, then that which means higher expected returns to capital if you can back a winning startup.
I don't know to what extent they balance out, but it seems at least plausible that as technology centralizes the economy then most jobs could basically be in service of gambling with investor money.
Its not zero sum.