The robots are coming – and Labour is right to tax them Gaby Hinsliff

My son has just been given a new toy car. It's small, blue and remarkably cute-looking for something that threatens one day to cost a lot of people their jobs. For what's unusual about this car is that it wasn't made in a distant Chinese factory before being shipped back to a warehouse here, then trucked to a shop, or dumped on a doorstep by an overworked Amazon driver with no time to ring the doorbell. This one came straight off a 3D printer, one of those faintly space age-sounding gizmos that works a bit like a normal printer except that you load it with plastic fibres instead of paper, and then programme it to "print" a solid object according to your preferred design. It's slow and expensive now, which is why the car my son was given isn't really a toy but a marketing gimmick.