WHEN JOBS STOP BEING EFFECTIVE MEANS OF REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH...:

The idea, once so amazing, of robots working on assembly lines is regarded these days as laughably primitive by those in business. Thanks to vast increases in dexterity and the ability to see in three dimensions, modern robots can cook and serve fast food; pick fruit, carefully distinguishing between the ripe and unripe; keep control of huge inventories and stack shelves accordingly.

But that's just for starters - because another thing on which these books agree is that those IBM customers were right to be nervous. "The machines are coming for the high-wage, high-skill jobs as well," Ford says. "Automation is blind to the colour of your collar," writes Kaplan, who also gives us the chilling information that "the holy grail of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is the disruption of entire industries - because that's where the big money is to be made".

In the great tradition of revolutions swallowing their own, one high-skill group of workers to have suffered already is the members of IT departments. (No wonder that the sitcom The IT Crowd is starting to seem as historical as Dad's Army.) But they're not alone. Since 2000, the number of financial workers on Wall Street has fallen by 50,000 - around a third - as high-frequency trading programmes complete 100,000 transactions in a 10th of second, while simultaneously seeking to mislead their electronic competitors. Now, according to Ford, "nearly any white-collar job that involves sitting in front of a computer manipulating information" is under threat.

And so it goes on. What legal firm will pay its juniors to sift through hundreds of documents when a computer can absorb millions in a few seconds? Who will trust their doctor's diagnosis when a neat bit of software can instantly sift every medical article ever published? Worse still, computers can now turn facts into perfectly serviceable journalism. All in all, a 2013 Oxford University study concluded, 47% of US jobs are at risk from automation.

The consequent mass unemployment, needless to say, will lead to even greater inequality. As Kaplan arrestingly puts it, Amazon's Jeff Bezos earns more on a Saturday playing golf than three average US college graduates will earn between them in a lifetime (if, that is, they hold on to their jobs). And without work, Ford wonders, how will people have enough money to support the mass consumerism on which any remaining jobs might depend?

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