Our problem isn’t robots, it’s the low-wage car-wash economy | Paul Mason

Mark Carney is right that we must stop creating badly paid low-productivity jobs and redistribute wealth - and that will involve unleashing the machines

The headlines were inevitable, once Mark Carney uttered the word automation. Robots, the Sun told us, are set to "steal 15m jobs from Brits". Sadly, our main problem is not robots; still less the artificial intelligence technologies that will power them.

Our real problem is symbolised by the car wash. A car wash used to mean a machine. Now it means five guys with rags. There are now 20,000 hand car washes in Britain, only a thousand of them regulated. By contrast, in the space of 10 years, the number of rollover car-wash machines has halved - from 9,000 to 4,200. The free-market economic model, combined with a globalised labour market, has produced a kind of reverse industrialisation.