Your description of the future reminds me of a series of books I read long ago, The Blue Adept trilogy by science fiction writer, Piers Anthony. In the first book, The Blue Adept we are introduced to a world called Proton, where everything is made by robots, and the people play games to earn money.

That is where we are going, but instead of just playing games, we are paid for our attention, just like you (and and few other people) have said in other articles. The attention economy is already here because that is really what we are all trading, no matter what we do.

It's just that over time, there will be more money paid for attention and less for manual labor. In a generation or two, OK, maybe 3, most people will be trading only their attention and nothing else. I don't think there is an easy way to predict how fast it is going to come, but it will come.