The conversation going on in front of me was such an outrageous cliché that I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or to interrupt it. Maybe I should have done both.

The well spoken couple were discussing the topic that has become our national obsession: immigration. In particular, they were dragging out that tired old rubbish about “them” coming over here and taking “our” jobs.
This dreary recital of imagined wrongs was taking place in the checkout queue at a well known high-street store. The self-service checkout queue.

Now, I’m sure operating a supermarket till must be one of the most tedious jobs going. But it is a job. Or at least it was. On that particular day in that particular store there was one till operated by a human being and five or six automated checkouts with a computerised voice thanking you for shopping at…

Had their brains not been similarly automated, the anti-immigrant ranters in front of me might have noticed the obvious. That the people who used to run those tills hadn’t had their jobs taken by immigrants – they’d been taken by technology.

Well, you can’t stop the march of progress, you know. And in some ways it’s good not to.

I’m not sorry that children aren’t still being sent down mines and up chimneys, or that cities like Liverpool and Bristol aren’t still thriving on the slave trade. (Although child labour and slavery are still rife in some parts of the world, but that’s another story.)

But there are better and worse ways of managing change, and I’m afraid we’re not managing it very well at all just now.

It’s over 30 years since I was out on strike in a dispute over what was then called new technology in the newspaper business. The kind of jobs we were trying to preserve then are now history.

It’s more than twice that long since my parents were involved in a Labour Party working group looking forward to an era of greater automation. The optimistic post-war idea was that with less work to do, everyone would have more leisure time to enjoy.

The danger was always that what work there was would be unequally shared out. That some people would be overworked, while others had no work at all. Which is, of course, exactly what came about.

And not, I think, by chance or mistake. It suits the entrepreneur capitalist class to have a large pool of unemployed labour available, to keep down the wages of those in work.

That is why the captains of industry tend to be in favour of immigration. Though I’m sure in some cases kind-heartedness, human decency and the honest enjoyment of cultural exchange come into it too.

But the question that inspired Mum and Dad in the 1940s, and vexed us in the ’80s, remains at least as vital today. How should society manage a world in which more and more jobs are taken over by machines?

Bill Gates, who became the world’s richest person by owning of one of the companies responsible – Microsoft – has an idea about this. On the face of it, it’s not a bad idea, either.

He suggests that the robots which take over people’s jobs (presumably including self-service checkouts) should be taxed like human workers.

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things,” Gates said in a recent interview. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

I assume he means the robot’s owners – unless he’s contemplating a higher level of artificial intelligence than is out there yet.

Elon Musk, the high-tech guru and forward-thinking boss of the car and alternative energy company Tesla, has a different solution to the problem. “With automation, there will come abundance,” Musk says. “Almost everything will get very cheap. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better.”

And that, he believes, means people will have to be given a univeral basic income. Not – as at present – given benefits as long as they are “looking for work”, but paid not to work. It’s a crucial difference.

As Musk points out, there is a psychological cost too. “If there’s no need for your labor, what’s your meaning?” he asks. “Do you feel useless? That’s a much harder problem to deal with.”

I wouldn’t put money on America being among the first to deal properly with either the psychological or the economic problem, even though Musk has been named as a special advisor to President Trump. And I can’t imagine Britain being in the vanguard either. Meanwhile I’ll go on using the staffed till while I can.

Oh dear, they’re not happy in my old stamping-ground of Sunderland. I can imagine a few worried looks, a few face-palms, a few groans of “What have we done?”

And it’s not the football club causing all the fretting and grief. They’re so used to trouble and uncertainty at the Stadium of Light that it hardly causes any gnashing of teeth – the gnashers got worn away years ago.

Yes, the Black Cats are facing a relegation battle. Again. I can’t remember a season when they went into the last few games knowing what division they’d be kicking off in come August. And yes, some Mackems are still sore at losing Sam Allardyce to England. Which didn’t exactly turn out well for Big Sam or England either, did it?

But what’s really causing worry and woe on Wearside is the future of its biggest employer.

A third of all the cars made in Britain roll out of the Sunderland Nissan plant. I remember well how it seemed the town’s salvation when the shiny, state-of-the-art factory opened 30 years ago. How it turned around the fortunes of a town that had seemed sunk in a terminal slough with the demise of the coal and shipbuilding industries. And an awful lot hangs locally on where the Japanese company decides to build its next Qashqai model.

Of course, Sunderland didn’t swing the summer’s Brexit vote all by itself. But the way the referendum results came in, it was the Sunderland announcement that gave the first real indication that the vote wouldn’t go the way everyone predicted.

Someone I know well was at the count in Sunderland when the figures were revealed. She reported that the mood in the hall was buoyant even before the result was given, and cock-a-hoop when it was. Not that most there really knew, or cared, much about Europe. Just that they were delivering a massive “Up yours!” to David Cameron.

Some of them are regretting it now. Especially after Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn said he’d scrap investment plans in Sunderland if Brexit meant the company would have to pay tariffs to export British-built cars to the EU. Unless the government comes up with a big compensation package – before the Brexit deal is finalised.

He told reporters at the Paris motor show: “If I need to make an investment in the next few months and I can’t wait until the end of Brexit, then I have to make a deal with the UK government. If there are tax barriers being established on cars, you have to have a commitment for car-makers who export to Europe that there is some kind of compensation.”

The same, one might add, applies to a lot of things other than car-manufacturing. In a globalised world, Nissan is not the only foreign investor, or potential investor, casting a quizzical eye over moves towards “a hard Brexit”. Ripples of uncertainty cause further ripples to no one yet knows what effect.

Life and business as we know them didn’t actually end the day after the referendum. Some people take that as evidence that the predicted catastrophe was a phoney. But Brexit hasn’t actually taken place yet. Its precise form isn’t yet known – which is where Nissan’s doubts and uncertainties lie.

Maybe the apparent slight recovery of the UK economy was just the natural drawback of waves from the shore before the tsunami strikes.

In a Sunderland Echo readers’ poll, 68% answered Yes to the question: “Are you concerned about Nissan’s future in Sunderland post-Brexit?”

One reader, Allan McManus, told the paper: “It’s all Sunderland has. You think it will be just Nissan workers affected, but it will spread to everyone, including small business owners who would be doing work for people who work for Nissan or somewhere connected to Nissan.”

It’s a classic case of “be careful what you wish for” – or what you vote for. And of being wise after the event. “If I’d known then what I know now”, and all that. Bit late now to say they should have known all along, but they should.

Just as Sam Allardyce should have known better when the apparently dodgy geezers from the Telegraph came ringing his bell.
 
 
 
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My old mate Doug Coombes made a good point about last week’s column – the one about the doctor who gave up drugs. “There’s so much talk of funding or not funding the NHS and so little discussion of where the money goes,” Doug said. And where does it go? “In huge quantities to the drugs companies.”

And there’s this. The pharmaceutical giants are pretty good at keeping relatively wealthy Westerners young – or at least smoothing out their wrinkles and restoring their sex drive. They don’t invest so much in less lucrative things like finding a cure for malaria, TB or leprosy. Bring money into anything and it’s always First World first.