For every invention we make, from mobile phones to online shopping, self-checkout tills, and driverless cars, we eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs elsewhere. Inventions are about doing more with less, allowing people to become more productive, and over time, the newly unemployed move into more productive sectors – from making buggy whips to repairing cars, for instance.

So perhaps we should be comforted by the belief that, as in the past, everything will work out just fine in the long term and everyone who’s lost their job will retrain to become a computer programmer or someone who provides services to programmers: to think otherwise would be to cast yourself as a Luddite. But the Luddites may have the last laugh, as suggested by The Economist’s Babbage; in short, whereas the technological advances of the past improved productivity while still requiring decent numbers of human operators, the advances of the future – most notably in artificial intelligence – could start permanently removing human operators from the loop.