The fact is nevertheless that fewer manhours are involved in delivering that audiobook than were needed to buy the book (or physical media audiobook). A server serving newsstories cost many manhours to produce and maintain, but distribute vast numbers of news stories each day only ‘costing’ a few manseconds for a full newspaper’s worth of content. Compared to the manhours required for cutting and refining trees to produce paper, and then printing, distributing and selling the newspaper, you have a much higher cost. Just the time required by the newsstand employee for the transaction to buy the newspaper outweighs the cost of digital distribution. All the other costs of the value chain end up as extras that are saved by automation.

I don’t have a simple answer for this. If you chose to consider it all in your lifestyle, you’d probably need to give up a lot of what brings you joy and satisfaction at the moment. But certainly being smug about how we innovate and disrupt for a better future is either not answer. And sometimes the disruption is only for it’s own sake, which probably all the fancy entrepreneurs are aware of. But they are people, just like the train drivers, and they want to make a living, right?