These are generally all reasonable concerns/questions.
Maybe the world needs (or there is already?) the AI-focused-equivalent of Reddit's "CollapseSupport" which is to support people who believe society is about to collapse from resource issues or war or other social dysfunction?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Colla...
Although looking at it again, I see some AI threads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Colla...
Like for example: "Feeling my future is hopeless and pointless due to rise of AI"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Colla...
I don't think there are any easy answers to the questions you raise. Some are general existential questions people have asked themselves for 1000s of years related to religion and philosophy about the meaning of life. Douglas Adams even explores that satirically with has AI come up with the answer of "42".
Still, isn't being a good human friend or a good human parent something worth aspiring to even in a world of superhuman AI and robots? (Or as discussed on Slashdot a couple weeks ago, which took such questions in a different direction, considering if "reality" is a simulation -- by whom why?)
The way you frame the question may also reflect your cultural upbringing. For example, as someone raised in a evangelical Protestant tradition, I was essentially taught that meaning was imposed from a single top almighty being ("God") who gave us a "Bible" outlining our responsibilities and so on. That created issues for me about finding meaning when I moved beyond a lot of the dogma. My teenage years might have been easier if I had understood how much meaning and purpose can come from within -- or rather from an interaction with our emotions and our physical and social circumstances.
While not identical, as you point out, AI calls into question many of the beliefs people may have about meaning through various material contributions to society. There are many issues in current late-stage capitalism that are already questionable related to motivation (e.g. see the book "Bullshit jobs"), and AI will accelerate that. Related to that see Dan Pink's work, including this humorous (in parts) talk:
"RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
One comment there: "This makes perfect sense in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you make money not an issue anymore is key. If people are worried about money, How they're going to pay the bills and survive, they're not going to be able to focus on cognitive tasks and perform well. "Autonomy," "Mastery," and "Purpose" fall under the "self-actualization" capstone. Money is not as important at that level of motivation."
Star Trek also explores that theme directly in a few episodes (like when a tycoon from the 21st century is defrosted and find all the money he had -- plus trying to make more -- doesn't mean anything anymore). Could you still find purpose or meaning in life if you found yourself (and friends/family) in a Star Trek world with a matter replicator and cheap fusion power?
Related humorous sc-fi with a super-human-with-blindspots AI called "Skippy":
"Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)"
https://www.amazon.com/columbu...
"A man's voice, with a snarky attitude, rang out behind me. "Excellent! Bipedal, 1300cc brain, opposable thumbs. A hairless monkey. You can carry me out of here."
I spun around in a panic. No one was there. "Who said that?"
"Me. Here, I'm the shiny cylinder on the shelf. I unlocked that door."
"You are? You mean you're talking to me through a speaker in that thing?"
"No, I am that thing. I am what you monkeys call an artificial intelligence."
I cocked my head and examined it skeptically. "You look like a chrome-plated beer can." That was a completely accurate description. The cylinder even tapered slightly at the top, and was ringed by a ridge. "You're really an AI?"
"Yup. You should refer to me as The Lord God Almighty."
"That position is already filled. I think I'll call you Skippy."
"Don't call me that, it sounds disrespectful, monkey."
"You prefer shithead? Because that's the other option, Skippy-O.""
The book "Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan depicts a post-scarcity society where humans have learned to interact well with robots and AIs (of a limited sort).
Some quotes to ponder:
"The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best."
https://www.thenation.com/arti...
"I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. ... (Howard Zinn)"
Two quotes from the book "On Caring" I mention here:
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
"No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds; I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once-and-for-all. (Milton Mayeroff, from On Caring)"
"Through caring for certain others, by serving them through caring, a [person] live the meaning of [his or her] own life. In the sense in which a [person] can ever be said to be at home in the world, [he or she] is at home not through dominating, or explaining, or appreciating, but through caring and being cared for. -- (Milton Mayeroff, from On Caring)"
https://sacred-texts.com/aor/e...
"But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. (Albert Einstein)"
Health resources I've collected over the years (made possible by the web):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
On the rats and robots thing, here is an optimistic view of such a world (where the "Stryx" AIs are the "robots") even as there are dystopian versions in other sci-fi:
"Date Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 1)"
https://www.amazon.com/Night-U...
"Alien artificial intelligence has brought humanity onto a galactic tunnel network
Finding a match for the top human diplomat on Union Station is another story..."
I prefer the "Old Guy Cybertank" series though as a more realistic version of AI (even if the settings are more fantastical):
https://www.amazon.com/An-Old-...
"In the distant future mankind creates sentient cybertanks patterned on the human brain to help fight their alien enemies. Then, inexplicably, the humans vanished. They just went away. All that is left of the human empire are the cybertanks who, in their own way, keep the human civilization alive. With an intelligence based on the human psyche, the cybertanks continue to defend human space, but also perform scientific research, create art, form committees and ponder the universe. These are the stories of one of the first cybertanks, known to his friends as "Old Guy." He has outlived most of his peers, and has had a wealth of experiences over his long life, but he is starting to slowly become obsolete. Join him and his comrades Double-Wide, Whiffle-Bat, Smoking Hole, Mondocat, and Bob, as they live and love and fight alien enemies such as the Amok, the Yllg, and the Fructoids."
While I am not saying if he is right specifically in that case, there is a speech by Captain Picard about not letting computers take over everything in this episode (and similar ones in others) which leads him to manually pilot the Enterprise out of a trap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It echose a point in the previously mentioned "Skills of Xanadu" story about a world of people conflicting with a world of machines.
To some extent, as with the AI-generated song I mentioend about my sig, there is also the risk of AI becoming another "Supernormal Stimuli" or "Pleasure Trap" (see books by those names). Which may lead to an "Acceleration of Addictiveness" as with an essay by that name. And those all pose problems as our instincts in a world of abundance can lead us astray as they were adapted for material scarcity (including of a scarcity of things like fat, sugar, and salt -- plus scarce energy inclining us to be naturally lazy).
Anyway, you have your finger on the pulse of really big issues confronting our culture. All the best as you wrestle with them.
One last point to ponder is "better for whom"? Or in cost benefit analysis, who pays the costs and who gets the benefits? How do "we" ensure a good healthy balance persists over time given that systems can decay for all sorts of reasons? And that AI does not have millions of years of evolution behind it to select for some sort of stability in an ecological niche? And if "enjoyment" is part of the human experience, won't people still want to build wood bridges over Koi ponds in their backwards just because they like working with wood and enjoy taking care of fish? Is it really better for such a person to ask or let robots do all that for them? That's a bit of the same question of whether to hire a (human) landscaper and gardener to do such things for you or to do them yourself? (Which is a question many wealthy people may wrestle with sometimes even without AI and robots given other people can be tasked to do things in various cultures.)
All systems have limitations (including just from speed of light) -- which tends to support Manuel De Landa's point here:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
So, inspired by that, I don't think there will be a single "perfect" AI making all decisions anywhere any time soon. If such a thing made sense, it is likely the Earth might already have a huge centralizes intelligence. Instead in nature we tend to see "intelligence" (as decision-making) spread across the planet working to various ends, ends sometimes aligned with others around the organism and sometime not-aligned.
(Laptop power fading, so sending this even if could be better...)