Thank you!

I am going to keep that in mind while making decisions. I am not planning to do something completely useless or irrelevant to the present job market, because I too need to sustain myself and my research activities, and I'll try to be at the cutting-edge yet be prepared of all contingencies.

I don't see any flaw with your logic, sounds good, except we need to develop such an injection first. There's also a very interesting thing there in your argument, something I have thought about a lot in the last few months.

It's basically this: If the scientist really enjoys doing science, regardless of what the future holds for him that makes his efforts redundant, and if the slacker likes whatever he is doing, why is one better than the other? Just because one has interests and aptitude that is looked upon more favourably by the society, even though both are just following their passions and natural inclinations?

Another thing to consider here is that if a scenario such as what you proposed would come true, the scientist would never regret doing what he did, because he could never imagine being someone like the slacker jerking off to cartoons for years.

He simple can't, because his genes and early environment predisposed him in a way that only made him satisfied with his actions when he did science, and if he even tried doing what the slacker was doing, he'd instantly get buried with regret and intense dissatisfaction. That holds true even if he wasn't working on the pill. A similar point could possibly be made for the slacker, but I'm not sure.

Another point is that both the scientist and the slacker made the decision for how they wanted to spend their time and what career they wanted to do (or not do) at a time when they didn't have adequate information about the singularity (like today) and so they went ahead with whatever information was available to them and any other constraints and goals they happened to have.

Why does that matter? Because I believe that a decision should be judged by all the information that was available to the person at the time he made it, and it would remain a good or bad decisions regardless of what the future holds. So the scientist may have thought that singularity or not, they like science, and this is what they want to do with their life, and so even after the singularity, their decision was a good one.

On the other hand, the slacker might have thought the even if there were no singularity, maybe life is meaningless or they are a pathetic loser not smart enough to do science or that they adjust don't feel like it and choose to rely upon the singularity even though it was uncertain if such a thing would occur in the future. He was willing to take the risk, and bear the cost if singularity didn't take place, so he also took an informed decision (hopefully).

I agree with your last paragraph- even if it's not possible, it's still uncertain, and the best case scenario, the expected benefits if there's even a tiny chance that it's possible, would be worth any amount of resources that we could put into doing research on it, and the scientist would have done science anyway, so even if he's the one who finds out the singularity isn't possible, no time wasted.