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.