Never mind the brilliant programmes on television during the festive period: for a truly astonishing piece of film, Google “Tesla crash”. You’ll see a real-life video taken from a Tesla speeding down a motorway. You can hear the bleep of the car’s autopilot applying the brakes as it predicts, correctly, that the car two ahead is going to crash. No human driver could have anticipated the accident. Other cars plough into the pile-up; the Tesla avoids it.

It’s the most powerful demonstration I’ve ever seen of the speed with which computers are overtaking people. It brings sharply to life the need to think about the implications for the way we organise society.

Humanity is, in the title of an influential book on the subject, running