IT sounds like a vision of a perfect world: a life of leisure an army of technology on hand to cater for everything on hand from entertainment to automatically filling shopping baskets.

But experts are warning of the need to address the issue of how society will cope with rising unemployment as the digital revolution results in the loss of millions of jobs around the world.

The concerns over the disruption caused by the internet economy will be raised at this year's Edinburgh International Science Festival. While the web is more usually presented as a democratising development which offers opportunity to the world, author and entrepreneur Andrew Keen will point out the darker side.

One report published last year predicted that around ten million British jobs could be taken over by computers and robots in the next two decades as huge advances in technology are made.

Speaking to the Sunday Herald from California, Keen, the author of 'The Internet is not the Answer' said: "Some economists are hopeful that jobs will appear - but more and more economists are worrying about while in the past new technologies have always resulted in the destruction of new jobs, they have been replaced with new ones.

"This time round, it is not clear where the new jobs are going to come from.

"There will be an elite of people who are trained to manage the machines, but this new age is a very disturbing warning for a society which was lot more equitable than this current world that is emerging."

Keen said traditional industries such as the media, music, and hospitality had already been decimated by the web and predicted a further development would be the emergence of "superstar" style economic structure.

"For example, as more education goes online it will see the appearance of superstar academics who have millions of followers and audiences of millions online," he said. "But for the typical university teacher who wasn't a superstar and will never be a superstar, it is extremely bad news."

Keen also pointed to the emergence of massive data "super-power" style companies such as Facebook and Google, which create far fewer jobs in comparison to firms of similar sizes involved in 'old' industries.

Keen, who will be appearing at Edinburgh International Science Festival on April 7, also argued that people were now unwittingly working in a 'data factory' by posting information on the internet which is being used by firms to make money.

"In industrial factories, people were paid for work to produce things and then with that money we bought other things," he said. "In the data factory, no-one is paid, all the value goes to the tiny group of technologists who have created the platform."

But he added that more could be done to address the situation, including an element of government regulation and consumers "waking up" to the implications of always choosing to use the internet over traditional services.

He said: "There has to be a solution. At the beginning of the 19th century, the industrial revolution seemed particularly bleak.

"There was child labour, there was terrible pollution and there was the irresponsibility of the first generation of robber baron capitalists.

"But the industrial revolution became more equitable and fairer which came out of a century of political and cultural struggle and debate.

"We are in the very early stages of this (digital revolution) - we can't go back to the old world, so we have to press forward because it is unavoidable and inevitable."

John Straw, a serial entrepreneur and co-author of i-Disrupted, which examines the issue of 'disruptive technology', said many white collar jobs were likely to be wiped out as technology developed to be able to carry out repetitive tasks.

He said: "The flip side of this coin is it gives the opportunity for massive levels of leisure time in an environment whereby if you haven't got anything to do, you will be able to play a new level of virtual computer games in your living room from which you never need to leave your seat.

"But that means we have to pay for those jobs and we have to pay for those people to be doing something else - not working.

"A lot of this is going to enable us to have more leisure time and less time to work - but somebody has to got to pay for it and the political parties have got to get their heads around the fact it is all changing now."