> Which kind of sucks if you think about it.
Yeah, it totally sucked that the tractor came along and eliminated all those coveted farm hand jobs. Software is the tractor of our time.
> Pretty much any consumer product will create jobs.
Such as the iTunes store that overnight closed pretty much every single brick-and-mortar music store in the world (mild, but only mild, hyperbole)?
> Examples of programming that creates jobs:
Games doesn't automate a physical task, but it's silly to assume that they haven't displaced other kinds of entertainment, say, perhaps, comic books. (I consume neither games nor comic books, so I'm speculating)
Whether an iPhone app has destroyed or created jobs depends on the app, after all it's just a computer program like any other. Take magazines and newspapers: There is NOTHING these businesses would like better than to shut down their printers and distribution divisions. Those are, if anything ever was, pure cost centres. Also, any app that lets you do something from your phone that you otherwise had to call a call centre to do probably isn't exactly a job creator.
I don't know how todo-lists earned a spot on the list, but there is no reason to believe that they (and any other "productivity" app, say, a good e-mail client or calendar app) don't, on the margin, raise the barrier to needing a personal assistant/secretary.
Advertising online is just one example of the lower-barriers-to-everything that the Internet has facilitated. Whether the Internet is a job creator probably depends on who you ask: A self-taught Rails dev or a Borders employee.
EDIT: My point, which took a little while to crystallise, is that at businesses the things being automated away are larger and have individual accounts, so savings/consequences are very visible. When you download NYT to your iPad, they don't fire three guys in the printshop, they need a small fraction of one of them less. When you send an e-mail to your mother, a fraction of a person in the mail- or greeting cards industry is less needed. Etc.