system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Am I right that, fundamentally, any productivity is better than no productivity? And that there should always, in the near future, be at least something for someone to do?

Obviously there's a lot of talk about automation and jobs lately. 

Something that occurred to me is that, anywhere and everywhere, there's always *something* that needs to be done, or could be done. You can tell me if I'm wrong about that, but my intuition is that we need just look around our house, or our community, and you should pretty easily be able to spot myriad things that could be done, that aren't getting done.

Fundamentally, if we have things to be done, and if we have people not doing anything, that has to be completely inefficient, yes?

I'm imagining some world in which unemployed people can do some kind of community service, and where there is 'something to do' for everyone who wants to do something. Is there a reason this doesn't work? Even in a future world of automation, it seems like this doesn't cease to be. If you've got, for example, machines manufacturing all the materials needed for infrastructure, that just means we have more stuff which which to improve infrastructure. I mean, are we going to run out of infrastructure to build and improve? It seems like having an unemployed person busy doing that is vastly preferable to having them sitting at home.

As far as compensation, perhaps their labor isn't worth a ton at first, but it's worth more to them, and us, than having them idle. Suppose I'm a reasonably bright person who is unemployed or underemployed, and I go down to the community planning office and say, "I'd like to help, maybe I can sit in on the meetings and start learning?" I know, that's basically what an internship/apprenticeship is, and that that exists in places, but it strikes me just how strict, then, the barriers are to doing that. Why don't we have more places where people can easily get into that? You could argue that people don't like to contribute to society for free, but then...why would any of you be here taking the time to answer my questions? 

I'm sure there are flaws in my thinking, but I don't see them straight out, so I'd love to hear more about it. Thanks in advance.
gpt
What is you core question? Or barring a core question, what is your thesis? It seems like you're making a roundabout argument that automation won't put everyone out of work because there is always more work generated by productive developments. There are certainly those who argue that.

Something to consider - is efficiency or productivity the ultimate good in a society? If not, then we must consider how optimizing efficiency affects other things we might wish to pursue, like leisure time.