The Definition of the word Work

I've noticed that there is a huge amount of confusion around this word and I hope it could be productive if I finally work on explaining what the word means to me and how I interpret the word is meant by other people because of the cultural baggage which seems to be incoherent.  

To me, the word 'work' is synonymous to the phrase 'productive contribution'.

The way I interpret other people's intention with the word work is 'any activity that produces income'.  

I'll start with the similarities between our two interpretations before I go into how one interpretation has taken the wrong turn (in my opinion).  Often times, when someone contributes some kind of effort to a particular cause or objective, they are rewarded with money on a contractual basis.  For example, when someone is hired on by Google to manage one of their many online services such as the Google News Stream, that person is compensated for their efforts, this person probably wouldn't have been hired by Google if they weren't productively contributing to the objectives set forth by Google News, which is to post current events to their stream so that people who use Google services can be more informed about their world.  Now lets say there was a software program that could do this function without the need of a human to spend their time finding stories and going through the process of screening nonsense from the legit, relevant from the irrelevant, sourced reports from un-sourced ones, it could then be said that this human isn't actually 'contributing' to Google News since the program could have done it EVEN IF Google still pays this person to do all of those things that the software program would have been doing.  With my definition, this person isn't actually working even though they are making money, what they are doing is a kind of circus trick to make it appear as though what they are doing is actually contributing, when in fact what they are doing is wasting time.  

I'm not entirely sure that other people truly understand what they mean when they use the word work.  It seems more likely to me that other people have been conditioned into a certain kind of expectation of what it means to work by their decades of doing what it took to make money, without fully examining the properties of the word and what was possible both technologically/ socially.  Also, it seems that older people now, unconsciously maybe??? expect everyone else to live the sort of life they had regardless if what they would be doing would actually contribute to society.  Having someone picking food out in the fields on some farm isn't actually contributing even if someone would be willing to pay you to do it, however, having people work on the machinery that would pick the food for you, as in the computers that control these machines or the designs and prototypes of new machines, or even the repairs and maintenance of the old ones (though with a machine that constantly breaks down or needs maintenance is an opportunity for someone to design a new one that needs less attention) would be something that would be contributing, otherwise you would be as productive as someone who learned how to juggle bowling pins wearing clown makeup for money on a street corner.

I think I'll try and end with an extreme question that could help with clarifying ones own thinking about the principles of what it means to 'work'.  If I stand in front of a camera for half an hour a day and someone takes pictures of me, paying me a thousand dollars a minute, would that qualify as work?  30 grand a day because someone thinks that my image is worth that trade in value?  Or is that something else?  Something besides what we all mean when we use the word 'work'?  With my definition of the word work and with the objective of increasing value in the world and with the level of education / capability of the population as a whole having a direct correlation to the overall value in society, it makes sense that when people are learning, people are working.