I think you underestimate what can be accomplished with human level agi. Human level agi could mean 1 million Von Neumann level intelligences cranking 24/7 on humanity's problems.

Looking back at the history of artificial cognition machines, how many of them hit a ceiling at human-level capabilities?

- A simple calculator can beat any human at arithmetic

- A word processor with a hard disk is orders of magnitude better than any human at memorizing text

- No human can approach the ELO of a chess program running on a cheap laptop

- No human polymath has journeyman-level knowledge of a tiny fraction of the fields that LLMs can recite textbook answers from

Why should we expect AGI to be the first cognitive capabilities that does not quickly shoot past human-level ability?

> Agents replace large portions of the current service economy greatly increasing automation / efficiency for companies.

> People continue to live their lives

Presumably large numbers of those people no longer have jobs, and therefore no income.

> we get human level AGI and hit a ceiling there

Recently I've been wondering if our best chance for a brake on runaway non-hard-takeoff superintelligence would be that the economy would be trashed.

If you can get a truly human level AGI, with enough resources it will get to super intelligence by itself.

If we can get human level AGI we will definitely get exponential super intelligence