This paper fails to separate out the effect of disemployment effects caused by offshoring, muted demand and robots.

I've seen this in a few other papers on this topic too (e.g. Ball state university, 2017)

I'm also a bit suspicious of their rationale for not looking at German data (German adoption of automation isn't much different, but the disemployment levels are wildly different).

I saw that and that would be fair if they were saying that automation was a principle driver (which seems reasonable). It would also gel well with saying that more focus on automation will just make things worse.

It's the statement that AI is causing the current issues that I find unsubstantiated. Unless they're including current manufacturing robotics as AI which is quite a stretch.