Every time someone says the machines are coming for the jobs, there’s a guy in the back of the room who knows the term. Lump of labour fallacy. He’s read his economics and he’ll explain it to you slowly, the way you explain things to a child. Work isn’t a fixed pie, he says. Automate one job and the economy invents three more somewhere you couldn’t have predicted. It happened with the loom, it happened with the spreadsheet, it happened with the ATM – banks hired more tellers after the cash machine, not fewer, look it up. So relax. Every century the automation take the jobs, and every century we all somehow still have work.

He’s right. He’s been right for two hundred years.

That’s exactly what worries me.