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Here's my optimistic AI world:
UBI a la the "Freedom Dividend" idea from the ill-fated Yang campaign. VAT tax gets divided among everyone equally without means-testing. It is sufficient for someone to live a modest life and it replaces other cash transfer forms of welfare. Still, it's just enough to live and watch Netflix all day without a lot of frivolities. There is incentive to work to increase spending money, and because your basics are covered you don't need a lot of work to reach a comfortable amount of spending money.
All decisions/choices made by humans (probably enforced by regulation.) Also work week (by regulation) declines over time to 20 hours or so. At some point, the White Collar work day looks like: You log into a computer for a few hours, Claude gives you decisions to make, you make them. Your AI Agent does all the paperwork, excel sheeting, and email responses, it summarizes and prioritizes the decisions to make, but a human gives their reputation behind each decision.
Teaching/doctoring/other white-collar-esque things that require communicating with a human in person become more valued, more people sign up for it, more training tracks appear. To match the fake email job work schedule better, shifts are shorter. Every elementary classroom has 2-3 teachers working 3 hours of class-time, 1 hour of prep. Admin costs go down for school districts/hospitals, more money available to hire teachers/nurses.
Blue collar work becomes mostly auditing the robots. Going out to the farms/factory floor in person, making sure the robots aren't fudging the numbers or acting funny, report back.
Paper and in-person meetings become more critical as time goes on because there is a distrust of the computer. The white-collar decision maker and the blue-collar auditor must meet in person or else what if the computer is lying about the results of the audit?
Training up a white collar decision-makers involves more external activities, games, clubs, tournaments, etc. We will no longer be able to train someone up "on the job" as easily, we need to be able to train up and select for virtuous, intelligent people . There will be tournaments, honor games, VR ethical-challenge-gauntlets to select for people who make decisions in line with the broader society. Imagine selecting the next VP of Sales by how well they performed on Mr. Beast's Squid Games.
Everyone who wants it can learn/study the arts and sciences. People still form university-like things but it's all passion, little status. All the funding goes to AI-run labs cranking out math theorems and running physics experiments under the watchful eyes of the auditors and decision makers.
Having human-made things will be even more of a status symbol than it is now. The last main category of jobs will be making things by hand, giving things the personal touch, etc. This will be economically feasible because these people will already have their basic needs met through UBI, so if they spend all month making a sweater that is certified human-made, sell it for $500 to a rich person for a status symbol, that $500 might be their spending money that month but it's enough for whatever extra thing they want to buy. Especially because robot-made goods will be dirt cheap.
the loathed email job is never going away
This is probably among the least likely of the AI forecasts--even less so than the 20-30+ % unemployment rate figures touted by many people. It would be too expensive, for one.
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