The article also doesn't claim there will be no impact, and indeed acknowledges that for particular roles it could be very consequential. The headline is just that when you average over everything the economy does, a 0.5% to 1% productivity gain is a more plausible outcome than 10-30%. That's the "somewhere in the middle" conclusion that this particular economist comes to (as of last year).

The reality is somewhere in the middle for now. Over long enough timescales, that reality will trend close to full automation (or all the way), unless society rejects AI and policy intervenes to stop it, or unless there's some hard final barrier that no amount of time, money, compute, ingenuity or labor could surmount. The latter seems improbable (are we at AI's vigil - or its nativity?) so Policymakers anticipating the former are only being responsible.