I don't think anyone serious was ever claiming they weren't trying to "replace jobs with AI", except maybe as a PR thing. Indeed this claim falls straightforwar

I don't think anyone serious was ever claiming they weren't trying to "replace jobs with AI", except maybe as a PR thing. Indeed this claim falls straightforwardly out of the numbers: Human labor is the most expensive component of most industries in the developed world, so naturally we'd like a subsitute. It's a much more obvious near-term target than, say, innovating over a decade or two to reduce the global price of commodity rice by a cent per kilogram.