Bertrand Russell once said that there are two kinds of paid employment in the world: to move objects on the surface of the earth, or to instruct others how to do so. That some jobs come to advising the instructors, down to many levels of advising the advisers of the advisers, makes the distinction no less binary.

There is a lot of discussion about how technology, and perhaps in particular the overpaid and mollycoddled software engineer, is obsoleting many jobs which fall into that first category — automating them away making things like cash machines, ticket barriers, assembly line robots and blogging platforms. Indeed, this process has been going on since the industrial revolution: when the noun “computer” was a job: one who added up columns of numbers for a living.

If the article is slanted against the engineers, they will stop there, and leave out the way those engineers have increased the standard of living developed nations dramatically, by building heating and cooling systems, providing electricity, water and information to dwellings by cable, pipe and electromagnetic wave.

Indeed, we have not even traded in the jobs to gain these benefits: for with technology come more jobs, and not just those working in offices sat in front of screens. Our new way of life requires monstrous quantities of freight, specialist construction workers along with the caravan of electricians and plumbers, car and bicycle mechanics, harvesters of huge plantations of soft fruit, and of course those who stock the shelves and work the tills which feed our “meaningless consumer-driven lives”.

So next time you object to the scrapping of an obsolete Cold War weapon system on the basis of the employment it generates, next time you lament the tube strikes because of the introduction of automatic ticket machines costing people their jobs remember: whilest the tech taketh away, the tech giveth also.