Trains with a guard become driver-only trains, which then become driverless trains. That’s the fear underlying Aslef’s dispute with Southern railways and accounts for the rearguard action to prevent further job losses across the rail industry.

It’s not the only reason for the dispute. There is also scorn for Southern’s management, which has attacked drivers’ basic terms and conditions, and there is anger at transport secretary Chris Grayling’s anti-union stance. But, at its heart, the dispute is over the status and even the very existence of the job of train driver, which has been around for nigh on 200 years.

Like most people, train drivers will have read the screaming headlines warning of a robot revolution that spells the end for millions of jobs.

Countless futurologists have been joined by figures like the chief economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, arguing that white-collar jobs face being “hollowed out” as repetitive tasks are automated, much as blue-collar manufacturing jobs have been in recent decades.

Economists are divided over the effect of increasing automation. Some hark back to the introduction of threshing machines into 19th-century agriculture and say that train drivers are the new luddites. Far from being the beginning of the end, the disappearance of farm jobs was a precursor to the growth of the manufacturing and services sectors that not only soaked up the rural working class, but also an expanding labour force.

On the other side of the fence are economists who argue that the extraordinary scope of today’s software revolution, from voice recognition to problem-solving algorithms, is a different beast and will knock out jobs in almost every industry.

Amazon fails to replace the workers displaced by its online model. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots, which won the Financial Times/McKinsey business book of the year in 2015, says that a large percentage of jobs are, at some level, routine and can be broken down into a discrete set of tasks that are repeated over and over each day.

He believes the sheer volume of jobs lost should force governments to consider a minimum income for all workers. He says: “As machine-learning and robotics technologies advance, a large fraction of these job types will be at risk of being automated away.”

In the US, automation has worked its way up the food chain for some, with the effect of shunting workers into lower-skilled jobs on lower wages.

There is plenty of American academic literature on the effects of automation, but only one study has taken a detailed look at wages over the last 30 years and appeared to show the effect on individuals’ living standards.

Robert Shapiro, a former economic adviser to Bill Clinton who now runs the Sonecon consultancy in Washington, spent six months hacking his way through more than three decades of census data and found that the most profound impact on the wages of college-educated, middle-income groups arrived along with the internet at the turn of the century.

The widespread adoption of technology in almost every industry meant that solid office jobs that paid above-average wages began to disappear at an alarming rate from 2001/2002 onwards. The arc of rising wages during a working life that continued through the 1980s and 1990s, became a decline for many people from their 40s onwards during George W Bush’s presidency. The 2008 financial crash accelerated the process.

Deloitte says 35% of today’s jobs in the UK are at high risk of automation in 10 to 20 years. Photograph: Ritchie B. Tongo/EPA

UK studies have found the hollowing out of particular industries has failed to dent average wages, mainly because there has always been another bunch of middle-income jobs to replace those lost.

Adam Corlett, a researcher at The Resolution Foundation, says: “Jobs such as those in secretarial work, administration and manufacturing have been replaced by new jobs in business, management, science, teaching and care.”

If anything, he says, the UK needs more investment in technology to raise productivity, which has slumped since the financial crash and stayed low. The UK’s productivity, as measured by hours worked per unit of output, is around 30% less than the US.

Step forward Capita, which provides services ranging from electronic tagging for offenders to store-card services for retailers. It said last week that 2,000 office jobs would be made redundant after it found workers assisted by automated robotic technology could achieve “ten times the amount they used to”.

“It doesn’t remove the need for an individual but it speeds up how they work, which means you need less people to do it,” the company said.

A series of studies by the professional services firm, Deloitte, has argued that the Capita move is a sign that technologies are increasingly behaving like a laxative for employers, flushing out jobs that are no longer needed.

Deloitte says 35% of today’s jobs in the UK are at high risk of automation within the next 10 to 20 years. Only four in 10 are in the low-risk category.

Across the UK, jobs paying less than £30,000 a year are nearly five times more likely to be replaced by automation than those paying more than £100,000. In London, lower-paid jobs are eight times more likely to be replaced.

From 2001 onwards, office jobs that paid above-average wages began to disappear. Photograph: Rick Neibel/REX

The only good news from the surveys is that firms apparently expect to create more of these highly paid jobs.

It’s for this reason British university students must behave more like their continental and US counterparts, who often think nothing of educating themselves into their late 20s and amassing a collection of postgraduate qualifications.

But the race for better qualifications to win an elite job – one that is better paid and more immune to automation – is going to get tougher as the new breed of almost jobless firms grab the lion’s share of economic activity.

Amazon, Google and Facebook, which have seen their incomes and profits grow immeasurably in recent years, are not among the postwar generation of firms desperately automating their processes to stay in business – they automate from the very outset.

Twenty years ago, a company with a similar stock market value and number of customers as Facebook would have employed hundreds of thousands more staff than the tech firm does today.

Not only does Amazon minimise the amount of tax it pays as a corporation, it fails to replace the sheer volume of workers who are displaced by its online sales model.

Rail company Southern says it has no intention of introducing driverless trains, but with driverless cars already being tested, it might not be too long before the technology arrives and train drivers are consigned to being another piece of railway history.

ROBOT WARS

Automation is not just going to rob a vast swath of school leavers and graduates in the developed world of a skilled and well-paid job. The robot wars are also going to disrupt the progress of developing nations as they move from a dependency on agriculture for employment to manufacturing and the services industries.

In October, the World Bank said automation threatens nearly seven out of 10 jobs in India and 77% in China. In the UK, four out of 10 of jobs are at risk, according to one report. Here are some of the companies planning to swap staff with robots.

Capita The UK-based company that runs the London congestion charge said it needed to axe 2,000 jobs as part of a cost-cutting drive in response to poor trading. It said it would use the money it saved from sacking thousands of staff to fund investment in automated technology across all of the company’s divisions. It expects to use automation to take on tasks such as IT processing.

Uber The taxi-hailing app was testing driverless cars (above left) in San Francisco until last week, when the California department of motor vehicles ordered it to stop after the cars jumped red lights. The company, which has a deal with Volvo, is pushing ahead with the technology that could see thousands of self-driving cars on the road within a couple of years. Electric car maker Tesla has taken more than 325,000 reservations for its Model 3, which has driverless technology and is due to arrive in late 2017. Millions of taxi drivers, lorry drivers and chauffeurs could be put out of work, though there will be jobs managing and maintaining driverless cars.

Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s restaurants could become overwhelmingly reliant on self-service if the chief executive of the firm that owns the US restaurant chains gets his way.

Andy Puzder, inspired by Eatsa, a restaurant where all front-of-house procedures are computerised, says he could afford to invest in healthier food options once he has shed surplus staff.

“Millennials like not seeing people,” he said. “I’ve actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk, when there’s a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody.”

Adidas The sportswear brand produces 301m pairs of shoes a year and output is growing at more than 10% annually. A new automated shoe factory in Ansbach, Bavaria (above right) is the answer to its growing pains. It will still need skilled staff to oversee operations, it says, but not the legions of semi-skilled staff of old.

The rollout of similar factories to growing markets in the US, South America and Asia, will only need 130 new staff per site, which means the arrival of a shoe factory in town will not give employment in the area a serious boost.