The irregularities of many real-world problems will keep even humans of low intelligence employable in non-AGI scenarios. Consider that even if you build a robot to perform 99% of the job of, say, a janitor, there's still that last 1%. The robot is going to encounter things that it can't figure out, but any human with an IQ north of 70 can.

Now, initially this still looks like it's going to reduce demand for janitors by 99%. So it's still going to cause mass unemployment, right? Except, it's going to substantially reduce the cost of janitorial services, so more will be purchased. Not just janitorial services, of course. We'll deploy such robots to do many things at higher intensity than we do today, and as well as many things that we don't do at all right now because they're not cost effective. So in equilibrium (again, the transition may be messy), with 99% automation we end up with an economy 100x the size, and about the same number of humans employed.

I know this sounds crazy, but it's the historical norm. Today's industrialized economies already have hundreds of times the output of pre-industrial economies, and yet humans mostly remain employed. At no point did we find that we didn't want any more stuff, actually, and decide to start cashing out productivity increases as lower employment rather than more output.

We're quickly approaching how smart the average human can get, that's the problem and what sets this apparant from the historical norm.

This worked before because commonly people couldn't even read or do basic math. We figured that out and MUCH more and now everyday people are taught higher think for many years. People, today, are extremely smart as compared to all of human history.

But IMO we've kind of reached a ceiling. We can't push people further than we already have. In the last two decades this became very evident. Now almost everyone goes to college, but not all of them make it through.

The low-end has been steadily rising, that now for 20 bucks an hour you need a degree. That's with our technology NOW. We're already seeing the harmful effects of this as average or below-average people struggle to make even low incomes.

It's true that humans will always find new stuff to do. The issue is as time goes on this new stuff goes higher and higher. We can only push humans, as a whole, so far.