> I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end.
I think I have a grasp on where you're coming from, and here's what I'm feeling: better philosophy, and better general education in philosophy, could be a good solution.
One reason I think this is that for some reason you don't already think everything is completely futile. Because... it is, one could argue. So, maybe you already have a culturally defined reason this is not the case (developed by philosophers, and this includes priests if that's the case for you), or you have undergone a rigid philosophical introspection and determined for yourself why think isn't the case, or, maybe you just haven't thought of it, and when you do, a couple thousand years of philosophical insights will be ready for you to choose why, for you, things aren't futile (even if they are!).
I want to think about this in broader scope though, because to me this is the question at the root of industrialization. I keep asking the people in charge whenever I meet them, "what do we do when automation has driven the value of human labor to pennies?" And nobody ever has an answer. It's a somewhat similar question to "what do we do when we don't have to work to stay alive?" At least, I think it's similar, because there's two answers to both questions, both answers are the same, and both answers could apply today if we didn't prop up artificial scarcity: "Nothing, and, whatever we want."
You mention "creating something that didn't exist before." One of the things that depressed me when I was studying writing, and often depresses young writers, is the realization that one way or the other, all stories have already been written, mostly by shakespeare (or at least, written down by him), or by a couple greeks, or a few rare influxes in the modern era as anthropologists finally started writing down what indigenous cultures have been saying for a few millenia. But that can't be true, right? New, interesting stories get written every year. It's true if you break them down into their requisite parts, basically tokenize the tropes. I mean at some level it's always either Comedy or Tragedy. Clearly though, new stories have value, and meaning, because people spend their time reading them and talking about them, voluntarily.
To bring it back to your analogy, building something that's already been built, can still be valuable to someone, depending on your definition of "already been built" (there's already an code editor, why build another? oh wow this one has modal editing, that is cool) and also because even if it's a very similar copy (as avatar is of pocahontas) there's value in the "flavor," the different taste. Even identical copies can have value: an open source version of a closed source tool with identical APIs. And even if it's a uselessly identical copy, it can have value simply in the effort you put in to build it yourself, such as fools like me that deploy our own email servers, or, repair our own watches, whatever. Of course someone can do it better than me. It's actually kinda stupid for me to do it myself, I might break something. But there's value to me in doing it myself.
Circling all the fuckin way back because I don't know how to stay on topic: A world where AI can do everything for us is basically no different than today. With some honestly relatively minor changes, we can automate most things we need to the point that human labor effort required is minimal. We decided we needed same day deliver from amazon, and so we maintain a massively inefficient system (and also artificial scarcity to keep the exploited classes in line) to create systems to cater to this need, but if we let go of "needs" like that the system ceases to be necessary.
But wait, there's more: change nothing, and I can find you plenty of people who don't need to work another millisecond in their life, and still have a highest-in-all-of-human-history quality of life. Why haven't they killed themselves yet? Why haven't they, as you suggest, dismantled the system that made their labors effectively meaningless from a "struggle to survive" standpoint? In fact, it seems almost everyone wants to achieve what these lucky few have achieved. It seems almost nobody finds "because it keeps me alive" to be the desirable driver for their efforts.
"that is completely futile in the end here" is the key thing. Why is it futile to grow tomatoes when you can buy them at the store for dirt cheap? Why is it futile to continue to have sleepless nights and lead teams and try to build businesses when your net worth is already 200 million?
TLDR my thesis: Currency is a shit motivator, "because it keeps me alive" is a shit motivator our system set up to extract labor from people, we don't need "tricks" to get people to be productive, people just like being productive. We don't need artificial scarcity to lend meaning to people's lives: people have spent ten thousand years finding all sorts of ways to make a meaningless existence under any system, meaningful.
Some books I think are relevant:
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - you are in the worst conditions ever created on earth for a human and will likely be there the rest of your life, why not just kill yourself sooner and get it over with?
Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks - more fun. Post scarcity more than achieved, yet people still do things. Read and find out what they get up to, and see for yourself that it's perfectly believable.