The central takeaway of one of their major, yearlong reports, Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation, is a blockbuster: “50 percent of the activities that people are paid to do in the global economy have the potential to be automated by adopting currently demonstrated technology” (italics added). To reiterate, half of all jobs in the global economy could be automated not just by speculative technologies but rather simply by the broad dissemination of already existing technologies.
