Good points. And I'd add that most things we've automated are things that have been routinized in a way where people conform to the system, rather than the other way around. E.g., a ton of software development has basically been, "take this paper form and make a computer do the paperwork". The hard part was already done for us when everybody got trained to be subservient to the bureaucratic process. So societally we have this limited sense of how quickly computers can take something over.

Real-world things like cars and domestic robots are much harder, because those domains are ones where people come first. As you say, key elements could well be AI-complete.