This essay argues that superintelligence's greatest contribution won't be brilliant breakthroughs but rather handling the unglamorous institutional work needed to turn ideas into reality. The authors sketch two futures: one where AI thinks its way to progress with minimal physical resources, another where it spends most of its time managing the vast bureaucratic and logistical machinery required to execute increasingly complex experiments.

• Frontier intelligence and institutional intelligence are complements—genius designs the blueprint, but someone has to lay the stone. History shows this complementary work has grown more elaborate, not simpler, as projects scale from Galileo's telescope to the James Webb Space Telescope.
• A "civilization of depth" would see superintelligence optimize its way around resource constraints through pure reasoning, while a "civilization of width" would require ever-larger experiments and bureaucratic coordination, making execution work more valuable than ideation.
• Even if AI surpasses humans at both thinking and doing, humans may retain value through comparative advantage in frontier insights, creative diversity, and the simple fact that not all minds can be geniuses—some must be bureaucrats.