It concludes that “estimates about the magnitude of labor market impacts (by AI) may be well above what might actually materialize.”
I can believe that in the short term. Especially if someone is raising money for Product X, they have a strong incentive to say "oh, yeah, we can totally have a product that's a drop-in replacement for Job Y in 2-3 years".
So, they're highlighting something like this:
A 2024 study by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, on labor force perception of AI (“IIMA Study”) states that 68% of the surveyed white-collar employees expect AI to partially or fully automate their jobs in the next five years.
I think that it is fair to say that there is very probably a combination of people over-predicting generalized capabilities of existing systems based on what they see where existing systems can work well in very limited roles. Probably also underpredicting the fact that there are probably going to be hurdles that we crash into that we don't yet know about.
But I am much more skeptical about people underestimating impact in the long term. Those systems are probably going to be considerably more-sophisticated and may work rather differently than the current generative AI things. Think about how transformative industrialization was, when we moved to having machines fueled by fossil fuels doing a lot of what had to be manual labor done by humans in the past. The vast majority of things that people were doing pre-industrialization aren't done by people anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture_in_the_United_States
In Colonial America, agriculture was the primary livelihood for 90% of the population
https://www.agriculturelore.com/what-percentage-of-americans-work-in-agriculture/
The number of Americans employed in agriculture has been declining for many years. In 1900, 41% of the workforce was employed in agriculture. In 2012, that number had fallen to just 1%.
Basically, the jobs that 90% of the population had were in some way replaced.
That being said, I also think that if you have AI that can do human-level tasks across-the-board, it's going to change society a great deal. I think that the things to think about are probably broader than just employment; like, I'd be thinking about things like major shifts in how society is structured, or dramatic changes in the military balance of power. Hell, even merely take the earlier example: if you were talking to someone in 1776 about how the US would change by the time it reached 2025, if they got tunnel vision and focused on the fact that about 90% of jobs would be replaced in that period, you'd probably say that that's a relatively-small facet of the changes that happened. The way people live, what they do, how society is structured, all that, is quite different from the way it had been for the preceeding ~12k years, the structures that human society had developed since agriculture was introduced.