But as a groundbreaking, brilliant book by a pair of technologists demonstrates, we should go into the next stage of this revolution with our eyes open.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W.W. Norton, £17.99) is by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The authors are not digital doom-mongers. They envisage a host of benefits for mankind. All manner of tasks currently undertaken by human beings will become automated as computer power and robotics combine.

Still, certain types of employment are going to be obliterated. Work at a desk in a law firm or in accountancy? Trade commodities like a young Farage once did? You could be in trouble. Those undertaking tasks such as cooking or tiling bathrooms might face less immediate competition from machines, because robots still struggle with spatial awareness.

Even there, however, the pace of change is so aggressive that the authors admit they cannot be sure. A decade ago, the possibility of driverless cars was a remote joke as developers struggled to get automated vehicles to perform basic tasks safely. Now, such cars are on Californian roads and coming to a motorway near you soon.

Ultimately, their realistic assessment — free of Panglossian piffle about the supposed inevitability of human progress — is refreshing and deserves more consideration by those of us in the pro-market camp. Too often the conventional free-market response to concerns about economic disruption involves an echo of the Marxist claim about revolution that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Millions may be put out of work; there will be disruption to the family and other established communities of interest — but relax.

For many free-market classical liberals there is a simple textbook answer to the latest technological question. Economists have been having a variation of this argument since the Luddites attempted to arrest or control technological change in the early part of the 19th century. Innovation, such as in the industrial revolution, creates disruption which displaces labour, which liberates people to work in new types of businesses that no bureaucrat could have predicted might exist, which grows the economy. Round and round it goes, with prosperity broadly rising, apart from when the course is altered by financial crises, recessions and wars.

What might be different about the coming Second Machine Age is the scale of the potential transformation and the speed at which it may be happening. Brynjolfsson and McAfee talk of us approaching an "inflection point" where technology suddenly becomes capable of tasks that seem impossible now. Then the graph showing the rate of change — involving the destruction of the ways in which many people make a living — shoots upwards and off the page.

At the more radical end of predications made by the technologists are the claims of a coming "singularity", as described by tech guru Ray Kurzweil. This is the idea that there will be a moment when the machines can think independently, at which point we must hope we have taught them to share our values. While other technologists may reject the Kurzweil analysis as extreme, ever-greater global reliance on computing power is certainly on the way.