After we make peace with robots doing all the work, will our lives have meaning?

Philosopher John Danaher's new paper "Will life be worth living in a world without work? Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life" assumes that after the robots take all our jobs, and after the economic justice of figuring out how to share the productivity games can be equitably shared among the robot-owning investor class and the robot-displaced 99%, there will still be a burning question: what will give our life meaning? The paper covers a lot of familiar territory, but gets going on page 16, with section 4, "How Technological Advance could undermine the Good Life." That's the meat of the argument, where Danaher starts looking at different prevailing theories of life satisfaction and its relationship to work, and whether fully automated leisure communism could give its inhabitants something to live for, amid all the ludic playfulness and lack of fear of starvation or poverty: I argued that if meaning and fulfillment are at least partly determined by how our individual activities join up with the external world, then there is something to worry about if automating technologies takeover most domains of human activity. They could sever the necessary links between what we do and what happens in the world.