> a return to rewarding physical labor such as gardening

Gardening for food, no. Craftsmanship, yes.

From a previous thread...

Everyone thinks about food in terms of economic costs. Few people consider the time that's involved. Yes, food is already cheap, but it isn't free because of the time humans spend involved in its production. That time must be remunerated, otherwise we'd call it slavery.

Imagine removing humans from the food equation, altogether. Production (vertical farms), harvesting (automation), distribution (electric vehicles), clean energy inputs (geothermal, solar, fusion), and maintenance (growing crops that can be used to manufacture replacement parts [e.g., organic polymers and carbon-based electronics] combined with modular, 3D-printed robotics) needs to be addressed. Difficult, but not insurmountable.

Once food is actually free (not merely inexpensive), how will it affect the economy? A large part of our economy is based on trading work for food (also known as indentured servitude). Such trades probably predate agriculture.

Hunger, humanity’s everlasting, unrelenting stressor is timeless and impelling. Hunger calls us all to consume, to feed corporate machines. Machines that were forged in the flames of the Industrial Revolution, when rich men hammered out schemes for our future. Their plans, perhaps unwittingly, followed the template of slave-driven civilisations wrought throughout the ages. Caste societies wherewithin the wealthy commanded the masses through control of food and knowledge.

The printing press and, on a larger scale, the Internet, have liberated our minds. In his plan for food control genocide, Henry Kissinger wrote, "Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents."

Wholly automated, indoor farming has the potential to liberate how we spend our time by removing another way to control the masses. In much the same way that lowering the cost to disseminate information liberated humanity from traditional slavery.

In that same 1974 plan, Henry Kissinger proposed rationing food in developing nations to restrict population growth. Starve people today to prevent people from starving tomorrow. How brilliant. Decades later, researchers learned that empowering women to make educated decisions about their own wombs reduces birth rates. Imagine that. Kissinger was wrong about the best way to curb birthrates, but right about how to shackle a population.

With the pressures of work, family life, and other societal impacts, time is the most precious of commodities. What if we didn't have to work for food, but, instead, could invest our time devoted to our passions?

Yes, there are people who have the opportunity to love their work, but I assure you, when compared with the global population, they are an insignificant minority. And yes, there are people who will loaf about in ways that contribute little to the advancement of humanity, but shouldn't that, too, be a right--if not, who are we to say how people should spend their time?

What's ironic about this idea is that the outcome of a work-free society is a consequence of free-market capitalism. Capitalism is the driving force behind maximum efficiency at minimal cost. Once food is free, capitalism implodes. And maybe that's a good thing.