We should be pleased that robots are taking over some of our old jobs

Mark Carney knows how to illustrate economic trends through the use of creative language. And when he talks, people tend to listen. "The massacre of the Dilberts" was how the governor of the Bank of England encapsulated the fear that middle-management jobs would be wiped out by automation – for people unfamiliar with American cartoon strips, Dilbert is a white collar office worker and the strip mocks the absurdities of office life. In his native Canada this week, Carney made a number of points in a speech on automation. Most obviously, many office jobs done by people would be done by computers, a process that was already well advanced. "When I look back 30 years ago, what I used to do in the City of London when I worked at an investment bank, probably about three-quarters of what I did is now done by machine," he said.