His ideas were the popular delusions of twenty years before; his mind steered a wabbly and anaemic course in the wake of the daily newspaper editorials.
Even at the time, the evidence for an imminent jobs apocalypse was noticeably lacking: employment across the rich world reached record levels in 2019, while productivity growth in many countries was anaemic.
After one year, they retest the haemoglobin level of the population and find that now only half of the population has a normal level and no one is anaemic.
His first thought was that the man facing him from the hearth-rug was the very Duncan Vyse of old: small, starved, bleached-looking, with the same sidelong movements, the same queer air of anaemic truculence.