In the post-AGI world (perhaps even in the post-RSI world) I think there will still be cognitive labour. I actually think the most important people will be philosophers, economists, people who deeply understand opportunity cost, scientists deep in a domain who have also been exposed to others, all with the moral seriousness to say which problems are worth solving. What will all these people be doing? Essentially deciding where to point the big supercomputer (the eye of Stargate, as @willdepue would call it).

But instead of this being a sad reality (we’re not solving problems anymore), we might instead view it as a beautiful new reality; we’re solving the meta-problem of what problems to solve (with finite compute, we’re going to need some process for determining where to point the superintelligence, and this process will likely become the most important one in the world). This is a large-scale problem (do we cure this cancer or that cancer? Alzheimer’s or climate change?) and a small-scale problem (how much compute do we give everyone? How unevenly does it get distributed? Do we believe in ubiquitous, UBI-style compute grants? Is this necessary, or will the value of the labour above still be enough to sustain something vaguely capitalistic?).

So if you’re a switched-on and ambitious young kid trying to think about what to study, instead of the answer five years ago of computer science, I’d now say become a renaissance thinker. Study economics and science and philosophy and literature. Learn how to think, and how to say what you think to other people. This to me is the opposite of repressed and vacuous humanity; it’s the version of humanity that is doing the most useful form of work.

The final form of work is wishing well.