And you think your uncle is a scalable solution to a city of millions of people. These positions dont scale. Some quick googling show about a half a millions workers in waste remediation in the us in 2023. Do you honestly think you could find half a million people like your uncle that all live spread out enough to fill all the positions (thats on the low end of need also fyi, not surprisingly they have high turnover and difficulty keeping staff for extended periods) around the entire us and that those people would never lose motivation or get burned out or just tired or stop caring. Because that is what we need and that is a single job for a single industry.

Its not scalable

Automated by who?

We do need incentives to work. As technology and efficiency advances we should be able to work less, but we still need people to do work they/we don't want to do.

Personally I think people are pretty happy working 24 hours a week even if their job isn't something they love doing. I'm more interested in working towards that, slowly, over time, than just going to "nobody needs to work".

Like, half of the jobs you listed would be automated out pretty quick in a world without money

If that was even remotely possible, companies would've done that already. Every company tries to cut staff as much as possible.

pretty sure we can find something better for batteries than lithium

Which requires research, which requires investment. Much of the research we currently have only exists exactly because of funding, and a lot of funding is done by companies, not by the government.

What’s left can be rotated out or done by lottery, and those doing the undesirable labor get to have more luxury items or whatever

I like the "whatever". Let's just introduce a shitty system that also potentially forces people to do work they don't want to do and they get like a bar of soap or "whatever" as reward..

It’s not hard to imagine, people have been doing it for centuries.

I don't know where these people lived that you talk about, but it certainly wasn't on this planet. Such a system has never existed.

Okay, let me rephrase it: Not enough people enjoy working the middle of an australian desert at 40°C in a lithium mine to cover the global demand of rare earths.

Some yeah, but undoubtedly not enough to keep it working. For example i doubt that many people enjoy working at garbage disposable or basically any waste disposal. Of course these jobs should be fully operated by machines. Or any assistant jobs in manufacturing or jobs that operate in shifts.

I was also thinking that. As an example, retail work seems to me to be a kind of hell I don't think I'd want to endure. But I know people that really enjoy it. So it's probably true of any job you might think is only done by those that are forced to.

I think, if AI and robotics replace most jobs. After some years of pain when capitalists enjoy the infinite money glitch they've discovered, there will either be a revolution or a natural coming to understand that things need to work differently.

Now, understand this would only work if the vast majority of work could be done via automation. In this case the vast majority of people would be able to pursue what they enjoy, a bit like the star trek anti-economy. If all remaining required jobs were no longer filled by those that volunteered to do them, there would be some kind of draft (think like jury duty), where people able to do a job have a chance to be called in to do it for a few months then released back to pursue their own interests.

I've always seen capitalism as the carrot on a stick we need, when we need human productivity from the vast majority of people. If that's no longer the case, it's not a suitable solution and all the ideas like universal basic income are just stopgap measures to try to eke a bit more time out of the capitalist system that has already run past the point where we can keep enough people usefully employed to make it work. That's almost certainly the reason we're seeing the huge wealth disparity that increases. As the productivity per person goes up, all the increased value only ever rises to the top.

Bit of a mini rant there, sorry about that.

I daresay there's a few people out there who might enjoy going into the sewers to manually remove the fatbergs, but probably not enough.

Living in a nice society is all the motivation people need.

You might want to read up on the bystander effect. You do the dishes because no-one else is going to do it. But as soon as there are others who can do the job people will just stand around and let other die before they put in the effort.