WELCOME to The Herald Opinion page. My name is Maurice and today I will be your content provider as you enjoy the next few hundred words.

Today’s subject is automation. Generally, this is accepted as a good thing, which improves efficiency and makes life easier. Everyday commodities may become cheaper, although often they will simply enhance the profitability of those who produce or distribute them.

Since the Industrial Revolution, automation has been a threat to those who make things for a living. In northern England, skilled weavers smashed time-saving machinery introduced by mill-owners. They were dubbed Luddites, a term still used for similar protests.

Automation threatens us in new ways. We often fail to examine claims made on its behalf, dwelling on its impact only after it has occurred and therefore finding it more difficult to curtail.

Globalisation results from automation. Western manufacturers have switched the making of things to “low cost” East Asia. This is not only because of lower wages. If distribution were not so automated – computer controlled stock, massive containerisation – then manufacturing in China and shipping to Rotterdam, or Seattle, would remain too expensive to make sense.

That giant distribution machine known as Amazon – which really makes nothing except money, and even that is debatable – is a model of automation, from the way it sells goods to the way it delivers them to your door.

The hundreds of jobs Amazon created at Dunfermline and Greenock are not highly skilled. They make sure the Amazon “machine” ticks over nicely, 24/7. Check the number of empty stores in your local high street as a rough measure of Amazon’s impact.

We are all complicit in this rush to automation. We want that book, CD or garden furniture right now. And we expect a discount; only fools pay full price, we are told again and again.

Next week will witness “Black Friday”, and the news channels will revel in the unseemly battle to buy stuff cheap. Biff, give me that giant telly! Pow, get your hands off that cheap duvet!

There are insidious motives at work. Automation is presented as the future. It means someone, somewhere, loses out. In a sense the votes to leave the European Union, or for Trump, were protests – probably futile – against the accelerating pace of globalisation, and the idea that someone else is eating our lunch.

Its promoters call it “disintermediation” or “disrupting the market”. They live in a world of such jargon. This week the entrepreneur Elon Musk unveiled a new electric truck, accompanied by familiar hyperbole about its impact on the auto industry.

Mr Musk had less to say about his much-hyped Model 3 which is not being made yet in the numbers he claimed.

We read a great deal about “driverless cars”. One company very keen on this technology is Uber, which might move into profit if it didn’t have to pay those pesky humans known as “drivers”. The truth is this technology remains quite far-off: if there is a driverless car just around the corner, beware, as it remains possible that it might mistake you for something less organic than a humanoid and mow you down.

Content providers like me cannot escape automation, or the hubris of the new corporate giants like Google or Facebook. If I produce a TV programme, I need to fight Google to get the same programme taken off YouTube. There are strong copyright reasons for my doing this, but Google insists I have to prove ownership, even though it is actually stated on the film.

Films are uploaded by anonymous somebodies who want to sell ads around them, even though they have effectively nicked them from TV. Why do I believe Google should make the effort to block that uploading? Because Google is effectively the publisher. But of course the Silicon Valley giant insists that it is just a platform that makes nothing, just like its rivals at Facebook.

As “publishers” they might be responsible for their content. Instead they argue they are “platforms” where people post content. The problem is that the people posting the content often do not own it. How often do you come across an article via Facebook or Twitter? The newspaper paid journalists to produce that content, but the “platform” is selling the advertising, the data, that they wrap around it. They acquire the content for nothing.

Politicians are way behind the curve on this frankly parasitic behaviour. They may have woken up to the devious tax practices of these same trans-border corporate giants – who make money in one place but whose accountants argue that they should attribute it somewhere else – but all of us have to take responsibility somewhere.

Meanwhile, thank you for reading this column, which has been spell-checked by computer. We do hope you will visit again soon.