Half the work people do can be automated: McKinsey

And what about those McKinsey consultants, surely their work can be automated as well? :)

It is funny that the managerial class thinks that they are safe from automation.

McKinsey predicted that there'd be 900,000 cell phones by 2000. If their automation prediction's error will be even a quarter as off as their cell phones', then we are not going to have enough people to have their jobs automated. I know inference here is inductively fallacious and here we're talking about job categories not job numbers, but it just makes 49% feel like 98%.

Important note: that's 49% of work people are doing right now can be automated with current technology. As a programmer, I see this as a signal that there's massive need for product and sales people. Programmers are the way we get from A to B but since <5% of the jobs can be 100% automated, there is still need for human buy in for almost all adoption.

Automation will create countless jobs.

How? Take retail as an example. Sure, an online store is cheaper to set up and run. Until every company has a web shop and you need to advertise to drive traffic, requiring a large ad budget and a marketing team just for digital. E-commerce becomes table stakes, and how you really stand out as a brand today is by opening physical stores that improves customer experience and brand.

In the same way, automation will cut jobs until it is ubiquitous. Then, searching for competitive advantage, firms will find new ways of adding value and hire people to do so.