An international poll carried out by recruitment website Monster has shown that 63% of workers believe that their job will never be replaced by automation – despite research from Oxford that says 47% of all jobs in the US today could be automated within the next two decades. In our capitalist world economy, as soon as the books say it’s cheaper to use automated machines instead of human workers, expect the shift towards extensive labor automation to be rapid, with far-reaching social impacts. The philosophical and political debates thrown up by this shift will be extensive, but it is a societal change brought about by technology that is just the next step in a series of small evolutions that have…