When the robots take over the world

Again, this doesn’t necessarily matter if the rewards of this revolution are spread equitably through society, but it obviously matters a lot if the owners of the robots – or the capital – monopolise all the wealth that they create.

Indeed, it can reasonably be argued that this is already happening, with inequality steeply on the rise in both advanced and developing economies.

And if you think about it, that’s actually what did occur in the early stages of the industrial revolution, when an extreme divide developed between capital and labour.

None the less, society eventually managed to get through it, and the spoils of these productivity revolutions became more widely shared. Capitalism has repeatedly adapted to survive, and it will do so again. When societies don’t, their leaders tend to be quite swiftly dispatched to the guillotine.