Once one combines the advances in computing, big data mining, artificial intelligence, speech recognition, driverless vehicles and robotics it's not too hard to foresee that the impacts of the digital technology revolution may have, to date, been simply a clearing of the throat.

Don't just take my word for it, A 2016 report titled Technology at Work v2.0: The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, prepared for global finance giant Citi, stated that "a job is considered to be 'exposed to automation' or 'automatable' if the tasks it entails allows the work to be performed by a computer, even if a job is not actually automated". On that basis, the researchers found 47 per cent of current US jobs at risk.

Fritz Lang's futurist film Metropolis (1927) imagined an automated future. The real one won't be as pretty. Credit:Fairfax Media

According to Futurist.com, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data shows that, averaged across the world, 57 per cent of jobs are susceptible to automation. This rises to 69 per cent in India and 77 per cent in China.

The low-risk jobs tend to be those which emphasise social or creative skills. Which puts me in mind of the cuts to funding for the humanities subjects over the last few decades. Can you spell "irony"?