1. Really depends what part of IT you're going into. From my experience CompTIA A+ isn't taken very seriously. There's a lot of irrelevant stuff covered and little practical usage for it. If you have an employer that will pay for it, worth doing as many as you can, but not really worth the cost for A+. Microsoft's Role based certs are generally a good start and are widely respected. CCNA is widely respected as well.
2. Can't say for North America specifically. Most people start out on the service/help desk and end up specifiying as they go. I started on the service desk and now work in IT Security. If you're really interested in the hardware side, you may want to try going into a field engineer position, but they're not super common. As things move more and more to the cloud, the bar to entry is going up as you're looking at working in Microsoft, Google and Amazon datacentres as an end goal.
3. Unlikely. The roles are changing, to managing systems that are AI based, but the roles are still very much required. In IT Security, we're in the process of deploying some AI powered systems to defend against AI based attacks. AI's fixing some things, but also creates new things to manage within the same roles. You may be a bit dissapointed though, as honestly most IT jobs don't really involve dealing with servers and networking equipment much. Most servers you'll work with in support/admin roles will be virtualised and that is going for networking stuff as well now.