To some this will sound like a nanny-state hellscape, and Susskind does not shy from calling his proposed solution The Big State. He does not, however, go into detail about how exactly the community will decide which activities are worthy of payment. Perhaps we will be subject to the tyranny of a slim majority that decides dog-breeding, classical music or literary criticism are valueless activities, in which case no one will ever do them again.

But the moral objection to UBI that it will encourage laziness and anomie is always at bottom a puritan condescension. If one asked Susskind whether, if he never had to worry about money, he would just spend all day watching reruns of Bake Off and slumping into potato-ish ennui, he would probably deny it. So why assume it of everyone else?

As it turns out, Bertrand Russell anticipated this objection 90 years ago: It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours work out of the 24. Insofar as this is true in the modern world it is a condemnation of our civilisation; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult ofefficiency.

Modern sceptics might still dismiss Russells argument as a Fabian pipe-dream, but the cult of efficiency is still very much abroad, and it is indeed what is driving the race to automation. Susskinds careful analysis shows that it will be an increasingly unignorable problem, even if his proposed solution will not convince everyone. At the last gasp, he even drops in the alarming recommendation that our future politicians should guide us on what it means to live a flourishing life, in the face of which prospect one might after all be happier to resign oneself to a robot apocalypse.

A World Without Work is published by Allen Lane at 20. To order your copy for 16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop

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What will happen when robots have taken all the jobs? - Telegraph.co.uk