In the Hollywood version of humanity’s end, robots, red eyes aglow, gun us down in a hail of bullets. In real life, it’s more prosaic: the machines hand us a P45. The robots aren’t coming for us, they’re coming for our jobs. Foxconn, the electronics company which manufactures most of our devices, uses one million robots in its construction line. South Korea is trialling robot prison wardens.

In the US automotive industry, there is one robot for every 10 humans employed. Hackett Group, a process improvement and cost reduction consultancy, estimates that, by 2016, automation will have replaced more than two million jobs in Europe and the US. And although the US and the rest of the world has recovered from the recession, employment figures haven’t.

As two MIT researchers, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee observe: “Companies brought new machines in, but not new people.” Economist Tyler Cowen, the author of Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, likes to reference a joke: “A modern textile mill employs only a man and a dog – the man to feed the dog, and the dog to keep the man away from the machines. That is the world in which we now live,” he says. The real-life punchline is even less funny: economists Jeffrey Sachs and Laurence Kotlikoff warn that “smart machines” could “engender long-term misery”.