The fact that the Financial Times special series on robots has been framed around the question “Robots: friend or foe?” is fascinating to me. I understand that change is scary, and that the cyborg from The Terminator is really scary. But my reading of the evidence is that the rapid changes we are seeing in artificial intelligence, sensor development and many other fields are not sending us hurtling towards a future in which the machines become self-aware and take over. Worrying about that future is so misplaced that, as the AI pioneer Andrew Ng puts it, it is like worrying about overpopulation . . . on Mars.

A much more proximate and real threat, and hence a scarier one, is that of economic dislocation. Robots (a term I am using here as shorthand for the modern, rapidly expanding toolkit of digital technologies) are quickly learning lots of skills — everything from understanding natural language to diagnosing disease to driving cars — that used to be the preserve of human beings alone. These skilful machines are going to spread throughout the world’s economies in the years to come, and they are going to automate some people, perhaps many of them, out of their jobs.

Surely this means that robots are our foes? No, it absolutely does not. To believe otherwise is to reduce us humans to the status of mere labourers — and that is an offensively reductive view of our species.

For one thing, many people are not workers at all; they are children or pensioners, the sick or infirm. For these groups, technological progress is a virtually unalloyed good. It will allow the elderly to lead more autonomous lives (think of a self-driving car that will let them visit friends and relatives, for example), while letting their families closely monitor them and intervene if they fall or become disorientated. It will let children learn what they want, at their own pace. It will let us tailor medical treatments to individuals, rather than simply doing what works best on average.

I struggle to see how technological progress could be negative, on balance, for any of these groups. Yes, children can spend too much time staring at their smartphones, and parents should ensure their screen time is limited. But we survived the advent of television, a technology perfectly designed to turn us into zombies who cease to engage with each other in any way. I am confident, therefore, that the kids will be all right.

But what about those of us who actually do work for a living? Even for us, robots are not our enemies — for two important reasons. First, they are not going to put us all out of work any time soon. There are still a lot of things that technology cannot do — from clearing a table to coaching a team to writing a novel. And even the biggest techno-optimists do not think that these things will be 100 per cent automated in the near future.

It is true that a lot of the jobs that technology cannot do today do not pay very well (largely because lots of people can do them, and this large supply of potential labour keeps wages down). The best way to address this challenge, I believe, is with a negative income tax that provides low-income workers with an earnings boost.

The second and much more important reason that robots are not our foes is that they make us richer overall. By increasing our capabilities and productivity, they create more bounty and abundance. We like to communicate, learn, entertain ourselves, travel and consume goods and services. Technological progress lets us do more of all of these things for a given amount of money (or, increasingly these days, for no money at all), and at higher levels of quality.

It is true that the way most of us gain access to much of this bounty is by getting paid for our labour. It is also true that this “labour bargain” is becoming a tougher one for more and more people as their skills become less valuable, because of both globalisation and technological progress. We need to figure out how to deal with this situation This will be one of the most important policy arenas over the coming decades.

But we also need to keep in mind that this is a situation brought about by the fact that technology is letting us do and create much more with much less drudgery and toil. If we cannot figure out how to deal with this, and how to make sure that the fruits of robots’ labour are shared in a way that reflects our shared values and protects our most vulnerable, then shame on us. In that case, we will have met the real foe in that case, and it will be us.