Talking Politics

We talk to Paul Mason about his new book Clear Bright Future - a radical defence of the human being in the age of digital transformation and a call to political action. The book covers a lot of ground and so do we: Trump and Nietzsche, machine learning and network effects, climate change and neoliberalism, secular humanism and Christian Enlightenment. But no Brexit! A conversation about the biggest political choices we face and the deep philosophical questions that lie behind them. With Helen Thompson.Talking Points:How do we demystify technology?In his first book on mechanics, Galileo described machines as things that harness the forces of nature.Likewise, Adam Smith emphasized that labour produces value, not machines.Modern science often likens reality to a computer; but we’ve created them, not the other way around.AI has the potential to fundamentally transform industrial societies.Civil society needs to have a say in how this technology evolves.How do we introduce ethical questions earlier in the process,