Hopefully automation will reduce the need for humans to do the boring, repetitive jobs and increase the number of people working in jobs they find rewarding and interesting. I doubt we could eliminate the former completely and have everyone doing the latter, but it seems that automation may improve the ratio significantly.
I bet people said the same thing when Watt perfected the steam engine. I'm not buying it, workload will simply increase to compensate productivity improvements.
Ah, but if people said the same thing, people were right. The number of repetitive jobs (being a peasant, moving your hand up and down a loom) has indeed decreased.
Being a peasant (in the sense of someone working in the land, not as the subject to some feudal lord) was much more free and far less repetitive than being a factory worker (or an office drone for that matter).
People also don't understand how many free hours those people had (because a lot of farm work is seasonal).
