>As AI begins to replace jobs, unemployment will begin to rise assuming new jobs aren't created when old jobs are replaced.

In the past, mechanization and automation was pretty much contained to one role at a time, not even necessarily one job at a time. So, if you mechanized sewing, you could sell more clothes at a cheaper price point, driving demand for sales clerks, designers, managers, construction workers to build new stores, and so on.

The thing is that this wave of automation is coming for arbitrary jobs. There's nothing that eventually won't be able to be done better, or at least more cheaply, by some software, maybe with a robot attached. Soon (now?), if you can make a better shirt for a cheaper price, you can sell it on a website, have an AI write the copy, have a robot build your warehouse, have a self-driving truck bring the shirts to a shipping service, a smaller self-driving truck go to a neighborhood, and a drone drop the shirt off at the customer's doorstep. Where's the new job for humans? Influencer? How many of those can an economy support?

You also now lost the jobs for the truck stop workers, and maybe some additional gas station and fast food workers. The self-driving trucks and drones will need maintenance, but likely less than older ICE vehicles. Planning on having robot maintainers replace the lost jobs will only work until the robots can repair themselves. (More likely an automated repair depot caring for modular robots).

As you note, it will probably take some time to get to that future. But it will be decades, and not centuries. How many of us can become plumbers and electricians before those manual, non-routine jobs are lost, too?

>This will take many years to manifest, beginning with basic jobs like long haul transport and admin services, and compounding over years towards more complicated jobs like the trades.

Don't forget that a lot of "difficult" knowledge jobs will be automated, too, and probably well before the trades. It won't just be fast food workers, truck drivers, and personal assistants.