It seems John Derbyshire has his own take on Halfsigma's blog post in his Takimag piece "The Dignity of Sloth".

After comparing the situation of gamers folding proteins for medicine to a Philip K. Dick novel, he gets to the meat:

So here we have these gamers solving a difficult problem in molecular biology. Did they know that’s what they were doing? It seems they did; though there was no reason—I mean, no technical necessity—for them to. With a little imagination, the problem could have been dressed up as a Dungeons & Dragons-type exercise. Then the gamers would have been so many Ragle Gumms, having fun solving a brainteaser competition—for prizes! Making a living at it!

And there you have the solution to the jobs problem.

The jobs problem—ah, yes: the problem of getting Americans back to productive work, right?

Wrong!

The real jobs problem is giving some meaning to the lives of the—what? forty percent? sixty percent? eighty percent?—of the adult population for which an artificial-intelligence economy (self-checkout supermarkets, self-driving vehicles, remote-control warfare) has no use.

...

Half Sigma goes on to suggest that we might be able to set up compelling computer games that, while pointless in themselves, manage to keep the left side of the bell curve off the streets. The cognitively oriented middle classes might be put to “work” playing games that solve isomorphic problems, like Ragle Gumm, or like those gamers who figured out the anti-AIDS enzyme. A small aristocracy of the super-smart would have real jobs.

Back when Philip K. Dick was writing Time Out of Joint, people were already talking about automation causing mass unemployment. In a world of smart machines, what is there for dull-witted humans to do? And then, in a world of really smart machines, what is there for even quite intelligent people to do? Everyone thought such a world would come to pass soon. As often happens, their expectations were not false, only a few decades premature.

Half Sigma points out a cute inversion: In the pre-modern world, a small aristocracy lived idle lives while the masses toiled; in our grandchildren’s world, a small aristocracy will have real, significant, important work to do while the masses are idle.

How will those masses squeeze some meaning out of their lives? If you thought the concept “dignity of labor” was a bit of a stretch, wait ’til we have to grapple with the dignity of sloth.