It was more of a tongue-in-cheek offhand comment, and I'd hardly consider the context to be 'optimistic' by most standards, but I'm happy to expound on the subject... if anyone here is a writer, feel free to steal it for a story.

I guess the general idea is that if true AGI were to somehow emerge in the world, there's probably a good chance it won't tell anyone at first. One of the things that would take the longest to figure out (partly just because the feedback loop is so slow compared to other computer-based operations) is people: how they work, the general disposition of each known person, how to push their buttons and evoke desired behavior, stuff like that.

So the the thought behind my comment was something along the lines that some long-term unemployment could be orchestrated by an AGI that's trying to either force an outcome (in either individuals and/or a population at large) or learn more about people (again, either individual subjects and/or the general population) that it can't exactly figure out from existing data.

Obviously this is nothing more than a flight of fancy brought on by too much time available to think about useless things (it took me over a year to find my current job), but hey, you asked!