Rise of the robots raises a big question: what will workers do?

With a low electrical hum, a small team of boxy, wheeled robots called "ants" criss-cross the top of a giant 3D grid of grey storage crates – 60,000 of them - ceaselessly arranging and rearranging them to order. Just one man, jokingly known as the robot whisperer, walks among them with a laptop. It would be hard to conceive of a more vivid example of robots taking on human jobs. "As robot technology advances, we can use them more and more, together with humans, to do useful work, and I think this is the future," says Jeroen Dekker, co-founder of Active Ants, the Dutch firm behind this newly opened e-commerce warehouse outside Northampton. "Yes, some jobs are disappearing, but that's the nasty jobs, for which we cannot find enough people."