In a shiny demonstration room in a Tokyo office, a small robot called Sota swings its arms enthusiastically like a small child as it talks to the humans clustered around it. NTT Data, the Japanese IT services company, is planning to dispatch these little table-top robots into care homes for the elderly, where they will be able to talk to the residents as well as control their lights, check their blood pressure and remind them when to take their pills.

With its big round eyes and childish voice, Sota (pictured right) is far from threatening. Yet many people are increasingly fearful of the trend that Sota represents: a fresh wave of technological progress that some believe will render many human workers redundant.

The idea that vast numbers of jobs will soon be automated has even permeated the walls of the world’s central banks. Late last year, both Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, and Ignazio Visco, governor of the Bank of Italy, gave speeches exploring the economic consequences of the “second machine age”, as MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have called it.