Are you missing the entirety of the data space in IT?

The reason those jobs aren't replaced is because the people replacing them right now are generally more expensive, though produce a more valuable end product. So the most import tasks in this category are constantly automated. It is essentially what I do all day. Brenda's performance spreadsheets just aren't important enough to be on the chopping block yet.

All that said AI/automation has been improving the process of doing that for some time. I don't think it will be ChatGPT, but every major tool that is involved in the data space is currently marketing on their AI tools. Mostly it seems to be a bit of stretch to call it AI. They are definitely at the point where the work I was doing 5 years ago in this space is largely gone and replaced by tools that do the bulk of the repetitive work automatically. Now large chunks of it are essentially just identifying the failures of the tool and resolving them or handling the more intricate edge cases.

What you're saying is possible. It's just the intervening decades that are a real problem. The US won't even handle insurance or a living wage at 40 hours let alone scaling back work to some limited few hours and offering those things. Sure it might happen at some point, but it's going to take pretty much a complete reworking of the governmental and financial systems. Those aren't generally things that happen quickly or quietly.

As a human species we can't seem to control the simplest of things. Look at any of the issues that most countries are facing right now. Even simple old technologies can't seem to be effectively regulated when there is profit involved. There just isn't a regulatory body capable of "controlling" AI development. So it is just down to profit seekers regulating themselves. If there is a dollar to be made, then I would expect that path to be thoroughly explored.

This is the leading theory. Higher levels of oxygen and huge land masses free of human development to roam on.