What others do is actually irrelevant to the argument.
If what you are good at can be easily automated... be curious, grow, and get good at other things you can provide more value in. These are usually adjacent to what you're already good at.
Also, the timeline isn't 'the next few years' or 'the past', but 'your entire life.'
If I used to provide some value X in a day, and that was enough to cover my consumption for the day, but now others are providing the same value X in 5 minutes, it will not be enough to cover my consumption for the day anymore
We don't all sit at typewriters anymore either, but former typists found other ways to provide value, I'm certain, and didn't just disappear and become homeless (the vast majority of them, anyway).
Once upon a time, we had armies of secretaries that secretly (well, not so secretly) were the backbone of every institution. We don't have that anymore either, since computers replaced many of them.
Computers were originally people. They also got bested by new technology.
None of those people disappeared or became destitute; they adapted, and they found new ways to create more value. (Or, it's possible some ended up working for rent-seeking corporations, which is a different point)
I can't really take that sentiment to my bank when I default on my mortgage while I retrain though. So although you're correct, across a lifetime, this isn't much of an issue, you're minimising people's very real near-term anxieties here.
There is plenty of time to 'retrain.' You could even do it while you currently have a role. Some people won't be able to; I respect that, and those people will still find jobs.
This is certainly not the first 'period of layoffs' to ever occur, and I am not implying people won't face hard times. They may! But that also won't last forever, and when people get laid off they receive unemployment, which helps in the 'not defaulting on your mortgage' thing. Somehow, people (on average) seem to manage not losing their home every time they get laid off.
The idea that our unemployment rate is about to reach 25-50% in the next 3 years is absurd, imho. (I know you didn't say that, and I'm not trying to construct a strawman. I'm just applying numbers to it because 'very real near-term' is not the phrase I'd use for something that is, in my estimation, still half a decade or more away.)
Maybe a part of the anxiety is the realization that much if what was delivered by well-paid people before AI is actually not something the very same people want to consume?
They're just producing what I produce, i.e software.
That's the most interesting thing - in 99.9% they don't. All their value is negated by lowering code base quality, pushing slop to prod ("but code reviews..." - don't help sorry, unless you spent a long time getting to understand a problem - simply reading a solution gives only false confidence that you understood it - you didn't, not fully). E.g. see all the outages at amazon, cloudflare, etc.
Quick short term wins lead to big longer term losses - and this is already happening.
The issue is - its basically impossible to make decision makers see this as this requires many years of expertise in tech, and it is very not obvious, and sounds like you just don't want to rely on AI to replace you etc etc.
While selling AI is easy - "look! it did this feature in 5 minutes! so much productivity".