Science fiction has traditionally depicted a robot takeover as a conscious bid for global domination by our mechanical offspring. From The Terminator to The Matrix, we’ve been invited to picture a war to the death between man and machine.

More recently, however, figures like Elon Musk have spoken about the rise of the robots as a more insidious threat to humanity. The machines may bear us no ill will, but they’ll cast us on the scrap heap of technological unemployment anyway.

Aaron Benanav is the author of Automation and the Future of Work, a book that takes aim at the conventional wisdom about the impact of technology. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.