The crucial difference comes from a more thorough methodology. Rather than looking at broad occupations and whole classes of activities, the OECD stripped jobs down into individual tasks. Machines are less likely to be able to replicate creativity, social interaction and the need for human-to-human contact anytime soon, and a surprising number of jobs involve these attributes.

Take the US category of "retail salesperson." Frey and Osborne gave that occupation a 92% risk of "computerisation." But the OECD points out that only 4% of such workers perform their jobs without face-to-face interaction or group work. It turns out that three-quarters of bookkeepers, who Frey and Osborne give a 98% "robotisation risk," could not carry out their role without human contact and collaboration.

The demon robot is starting to look less terrifying. Indeed, he has been maligned before. The BBC archive contains a 1978 episode of the television series "Horizon" that explained how a new brain wave called the microchip was "the reason why our children will grow up without jobs to go to." Back in the 1810s, the Luddites destroyed new cotton-producing machinery, which they saw as throwing thousands of workers on to the scrap heap. In reality, the story of human progress since the birth of agriculture around 10000 BC has been the story of humans replacing labour with technology and freeing up time to do new, and different, jobs. That process speeded up after the 1750s, and – even if sometimes falteringly and unevenly – it eventually drove living standards to be transformatively higher.

Two economic effects

Labour-saving technology has two economic effects. The first and more obvious is displacement: New inventions displace workers and throw some people out of employment. But secondly and less obviously, those who keep working are now more productive – churning out as much stuff as many more workers did previously. Those newly productive workers should soon earn more, and so spend more as well. That fuels demand and creates new jobs, compensating for the posts that have gone. Before too long, history suggests that this compensation effect will be the dominant one..

But the debate is still shot through with anxiety – witness the calls from Gates, Hamon and others for a "tax on robots" to slow technological progress and protect jobs. This is certainly a more sophisticated Luddism than the original – "tax the looms" rather than "smash the looms."

There may be more person-to-person skills that will never easily be replaced meaning wild predictions about job losses may be unwarranted. Supplied

We are debating a problem we don't have, rather than facing a real crisis that is the polar opposite. Productivity growth has slowed to a crawl over the last 15 or so years, business investment has fallen and wage growth has been weak. If the robot revolution truly was under way, we would see surging capital expenditure and soaring productivity. Right now, that would be a nice "problem" to have. Instead we have the reality of weak growth and stagnant pay. The real and pressing concern when it comes to the job market and automation is that the robots aren't taking our jobs fast enough.


Prospect

Duncan Weldon is chief economist at Resolution Group, a UK financial services business.

©Prospect, distributed by The New York Times Syndicate