Debate: will a robot steal your job?

Was Karl Marx right all along about capitalism? One of the subjects I like to bore everyone about whenever I get a chance is the hollowing out of middle-class jobs as a result of technology, squeezing wages just as the old German predicted. It’s the subject of a Spectator debate tonight, which will be well worth attending, and a subject I wrote about for the magazine last year:

‘Jaron Lanier, the Silicon Valley philosopher and author of Who Owns The Future?, has shown how technology and the free-flow of information are removing secure, middle-class jobs. Far from being egalitarian, the digital revolution has reduced financial rewards for those in the middle — and concentrated wealth at the very top. While outsourcing of clerical work is hardly new, it has started to affect the middle office — not just the back office. Once, it was production-line workers who found themselves laid off and their jobs shipped to the Far East.