the phrase "are automated or can be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and the pure-opinion portion "or can be" is doing about 99% of that heavy lifting

put tersely, they aren't, and can't be in the relevantly immediate future, so the optimistic take might have been misconstrued as youth (since such optimism on average tends to decrease with age, in my experience)

it's a good premise for a sci-fi novel at the moment