Until recently, if you said the word “truck drivers” and “21st-century economy” in the same breath, most economists — and voters — would have guessed that the next words would be “job losses”.

No wonder. A couple of years ago, auto experts started to warn that computers will soon be driving not just cars, but trucks, too. A 2017 trucking industry report, for example, predicts that by 2030 some 4.4m of the 6.4m trucker jobs in Europe and America could disappear, since robots will be driving.

Unsurprisingly, that has sparked plenty of hand-wringing about the political economy, especially in America. After all, in recent decades truck driving has been one of the best-paying jobs for non-college American graduates, and the workforce is overwhelmingly male, middle-aged and lowly-educated.