I don't disagree, though it is probably a safe bet that some kinds of work will be automated faster than others, and faster than people think.

My job is safe because much of it is based in lunacy that my craggy old corporation can't get out of because it's magnificently dysfunctional and entrenched bureaucracy won't allow it. And no, it isn't lost on me that this state of affairs might well spell the death of the company altogether. If a competitor of ours found a way to leverage something like AI to eliminate the jungle of chaos I live in every day in their company, mine would follow suit or die a sad, pitiful death. And I'm thinking that's going to be the way of it - when the technology reaches a point where some set of tasks is suddenly cheaply done by AI, one company will implement it and the dominoes will fall, one way or the other, throughout whatever industry pretty suddenly.

It's the sudden part that is the fly in Rand's ointment. If too many people are in the bread line too quickly, chaos will ensue. And another fly is the quality of the new job - a big part of the problem in the US is the old coal miner / steel worker / factory worker job that paid pretty good goes away and the work those folks find pays less and/or has crappier benefits -- it isn't just about that unemployment rate. There are a lot of flies for the ointment, actually. Nothing is simple. But when AI really gets rolling, if those dominoes fall quickly, it will be chaos.