“Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that
is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses,
his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
When Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote these words in “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” in 1848, Europe was in the
grip of multiple revolutions and their channelling of Shakespeare’s prose on
impermanence was apt indeed.
In the
previous half-century, three key technological advances – Arkwright’s spinning
machine, Watt’s steam engine and Cartwright’s power loom – had made real the
Industrial Revolution, itself the offspring of revolutions in thought and
learning stretching back over three centuries from the birth of the Renaissance
to the enlightenment of the Age of Reason. Powerful new mechanised productive
forces swept aside the remnants of the feudal age, with liberalism tearing down
the privileges of the old nobility and the hierarchy of entitlement and
obligation that had governed society for over a millennium and longer.
As Marx and
Engels observed, global transportation opened up whole new industries with the
potential to create a world of abundance. Raw materials could be transformed
into hitherto unimagined goods and services in undreamt of quantities. All that
was solid was indeed melted – not into air, but recast into new forms with ever
new uses and benefits to their owners.
Yet the
liberal world was not one of benefit to all – for the system that forged this
change was one of capitalist exploitation and accumulation. While feudal lords
had fixed the lives of their serfs to an unchanging existence of mostly
agrarian toil, this had its limits and compensations – feast days most weeks,
commonly held land and the protection of their overlord. As that system was
swept away, a largely rural Continent was swept by Acts of Enclosure, alienating
previously commonly held land and resources to new private owners. Tens of
millions were forced off the land to be delivered into the gaping jaws of urban
factories and poorhouses, which consumed human labour with less regard than
that afforded the iron pigment dripping from the hellish blast furnaces tended
by these disposable workers.
It was then
against this backdrop that the Manifesto
was written as the social and economic dislocation of the early 19th
century spilled onto the streets in scores of European cities in the form of
revolutionary violence. While these uprisings ultimately failed, the vision of
constant change summoned up by its authors was to become ever more prescient as
liberal capitalism continued its march far beyond Europe’s heartlands to grip
the globe in its all-encompassing embrace.
Technological
change was both the enabler and the product of this new system – as the
ecosocialist Murray Bookchin observed in his “Towards a Liberatory Technology” (1965), the eight decades after
the Manifesto saw humanity go through
two further major transitions. First was what he called the Paleotechnic Age of
coal and steel in the 1850s and 1860s, and then from the 1890s, the Neotechnic
Age of electricity, synthetic chemicals and the internal combustion engine. Yet
as Bookchin also observed, in spite of the exponential enhancement of power
granted by mechanisation, “Ironically,
both ages of technology seemed to enhance the importance of toil in society.”
Prior to
industrialisation, tools such as spades and axes were used to augment and
enhance human effort, while manufacturing was in the hands of craft workers,
who rendered raw materials into finished products usually from start to finish
– leather hides to hand-made shoes; clay into wheeled crockery, and so on.
Industrialisation changed this irreversibly – while the sheer scale of 19th
and early 20th machinery required large numbers of operatives, in a
sharp reversal of roles, humans increasingly augmented the effort of the
machines. Capitalist management specialists like F.D. Taylor developed and
applied theories where the human element meshed with the technological into the
so-called “Man-Machine”, where processes were broken down as near as possible
to single, repetitive, often physically demanding tasks. Any need for the
complex and individual knowledge of the craft-workers of old was removed,
deskilling and alienating the worker from the eventual product of their labour.
 |
| Lang's Metropolis |
Marx had
foreseen the liberatory potential of new technology, but he also knew that in
the mid-19th century it was not yet at a stage that could free
humanity from the need to work – hence his acceptance of the necessity of a
bourgeois stage of economic transformation. Even without the inequity of the
accumulation of surplus wealth by the ruling class, industry could not yet
provide abundance, whatever the economic system. While the combination of the importance
and the exploitation of labour put the newly emergent working classes at the
heart of revolutionary thinking, socialism itself continued to emphasise the
nobility of hard work.
Reflecting this,
Lenin was heavily influenced by Taylorism and had a portrait of the Taylorite founder
of US production-line mass manufacturing, Henry Ford, in his Kremlin office.
Even under Soviet socialism, with Russia’s proclaimed need for massive
modernisation, humans were ultimately resources to be minimised in terms of cost
and subordinated to process. In the Stalinist USSR, the shock brigades of
Stakhanovite workers (so named after a miner who allegedly dug 14 times the
average amount of coal produced by his colleagues) were perhaps the apogee of
this.
Fritz Lang’s
1929 dystopian film Metropolis stunningly
evokes the Man-Machine in a scene
where rows of human workers perform repetitive, isolated tasks, swinging levers
to and fro in their individual compartments, stacked on top of each other,
machines themselves in all but flesh and name, more cogs in the service of an
industrial megalith. Perhaps more gently satirical, but equal damning, was
Chaplin’s Modern Times. In this,
following the implementation an automated feeding machine for workers intended to
eliminate wasteful lunchbreaks and keep ahead of their competitors, Chaplin’s
employers force factory operatives to keep up with an ever-faster production
line, with perhaps predictable, but nevertheless telling, slapstick results.
Fast-forward
seven decades and technology’s relentless development has reached an entirely
new epoch.
While Lang
and Chaplin satirised the contemporary theme of humans enslaved by machines,
strikingly, the very first use of the word “Robot”,
derived from an Old Slavonic word for “slave”, was in the 1920 Czech play by
Karel Capek, R.U.R. – Rossums’ Universal
Robots – which foresaw intelligent, autonomous androids – the robots - not
enslaving humans, but replacing them altogether. And as time and technology
have progressed, R.U.R. seems somewhat less fantastical than it did back in
post-Habsburg Prague – or even in 1938 when it was the first ever sci fi TV
programme broadcast by the BBC.
The human
factor has diminished, not only in physical effort but in mental processing
too. Almost by stealth, unnoticed by many and incomprehensible to most, this is
now the defining issue of our time, greater even than the danger of climate
change because, in the end, it may be either our deliverer from disaster or the
harbinger of our end.
The
development of computers and the rise of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has
transformed our world. First in the 1920s and 1930s as automated calculating
machines capable of processing data much faster than humans and then, with huge
investment by all the belligerent powers during the Second World War, used for
a range of purposes including by Alan Turing as a decoding machine at Bletchley
Park, drove the dynamic rapidly forward. As Martin Ford chronicles in “The Rise
of the Robots”, its capacity now doubles every eighteen months or so – for
example, there is many more times computing power now available in a Smartphone
than used in the Apollo Moon landings. The invention of the silicon chip and
subsequent miniaturisation, ever faster processing and increasing automation
has led to more and more functions requiring little or no human input at all.
From
domestic appliances through the omnipresent internet to automated factories and
semi-autonomous military machines, automation has made possible whole aspects
of life that even two decades ago would have seemed fantastical. Seemingly
light years on from the giant mainframes of the 1940s and 1950s, smaller and
more powerful computers have become everyday items. Real robots, including a
growing number in ever more human-like android form, have emerged in virtually
every arena of society. And there is little sign of this slowing down.
The
consequences have been and will be profound, far beyond the immediate purpose
of any piece of technology itself. As the majority of this is being driven by
profit-seeking companies, albeit often subsidised in one way or another by
public funds, the appeal of employing automated tech rather than people is
obvious - robots, living up to the origin of their name, don’t take holidays,
fall sick, demand pay rises, join unions, go on strike, take breaks or need
sleep. Yet there is precious little public debate and even less control over
the new world that is being shaped by the R&D wing of post-(Henry) Fordist
capitalism.
Previous
waves of new machinery have of course destroyed old industries and created new ones.
While this often led to resistance from established owners and workforces,
ultimately it provided sufficient benefit to be at least tolerated and often
embraced by the societies it served. What Keynes referred to as “a temporary phase of maladjustment”
ultimately gave way to new forms of previously unimagined work and in time to
higher living standards for workers as well as owners.
 |
| We can be replaced |
So, some
have argued, fears of the current wave of change leaving hundreds of millions,
if not billions, of human workers surplus to requirements could be misplaced. While
Oxford academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne have infamously predicted
artificial intelligence will replace 47% of current jobs by 2030 (a prediction
for the US economy – their UK figure stands at around 30%), US Professor of
Economics Robert Gordon argues it will be a somewhat more conservative 15%.
He is joined
in this caution by Marxist academic David Harvey, who points to the exponential
growth in the global labour force in the last few decades as a counter to those
proclaiming the end of human work. While western countries like the UK and USA
do show symptoms of the beginning of a shift to a low job, hi-tech economy,
their recent “jobless recoveries” can
equally be attributed to the outsourcing of jobs to new low wage labour markets
first in post-Soviet eastern Europe and then in South and East Asia. Harvey has
pointed to this though as a one-off process, unable to be repeated on our
finitely sized planet.
However, others
such as Martin Ford claim that, this time, the new tech revolution is different
in a number of ways. In the past, changes in industrial processes often occurred
over many years, even generations, and still required human input to function. Now,
however, the pace is infinitely faster and the impact deeper and far more destructive
than with past tech-shocks. There is far less time to understand and
accommodate change and disruption is so great that the entire economic system
itself seems increasingly unstable and inherently unable to correct itself.
The
destruction of whole labour forces at a macro-economic level could sound the
death-knell of the very consumer markets that capitalism requires to survive
and thrive. Yet, at the micro-economic level which predominates in our economic
system, the self-interest of individual companies in maximising competitive
advantage over their rivals means that the drive to replace the labour of human
hands and brains with the micro-processing units and silicon chips of robots will
continue apace.
 |
| Auto-waiter McDonalds, Leeds |
Apocryphally,
this change can be most strikingly observed in High Streets everywhere –
supermarkets led the way with the euphemistically named “fast-lanes” where customers scan and pack their own purchases,
interrupted only by the barking tones of the A.I. warning about unexpected
items in the bagging area and harsh metallic alarms demanding that the sole
human employee on duty should guess the age of the person trying to scan porn DVDs
alongside their cornflakes. Many other retailers have followed suit in whole or
in part – McDonald’s are rapidly replacing human order-taking with a forest of
large consoles in each of their outlets and some fully automated servers are
already being trialled. Whilst humans will not entirely disappear from the
retail experience for many years yet, our numbers are set to drop dramatically.
The
migration of much consumer shopping online has further hastened this
dehumanisation of labour. In Amazon warehouses robots perform ever more of the
distribution sequencing required to get your exotic brand of toothpaste from
the shelf to a box to a delivery drone. Even in the City of London, algorithms
have replaced human traders to undertake the scandal that is “split-second trading”.
In the midst
of this sits the military-industrial complex, now as in the days of Empire,
driving and funding much of the research that is creating ever-more ingenious
and terrifyingly powerful possibilities. The military application of A.I. has
seen the rise of remote-piloted drone technology to the point that the USAF and
the RAF are training more drone operators than pilots. Military robots akin to
props out of bad science fiction movies are already a reality and the next
major phase is to move towards truly independent, autonomous weaponry, guided
and limited by nothing but the algorithms of its software. As human soldiers
become redundant, the risk of conflict is likely to grow both in frequency and
ferocity, with untold “collateral” impact.
 |
| AI Dog Soldiers |
Robert
Gordon and others may try to downplay it, but the human factor in the workplace
is in long-term decline. According to the number-crunching analysis of Frey and
Osborne, a host of roles from credit analysts, cooks and estate agents to crane
operators, taxi drivers and baggage porters will disappear, while others such as
solicitors will find software replacing large numbers of their profession.
Some human
roles will be relatively immune – work requiring significant precision and manual
dexterity, such as plumbing or gas engineering, will not be possible to replace
using the level of robotic technology likely to be available in the next two decades.
Similarly, while A.I. programmes like Deep
Blue may be increasingly good at winning chess championships, even
cutting-edge android robots like Asimo remain somewhat less adept at clearing
and cleaning the spectators’ area after the match is over - so people with mops
and dusters are likely to remain in demand. Likewise, “cognitive roles” requiring a high level of human interaction and
understanding, such as psychologists, surgeons, engineers and fashion designers
should be safer – so, perhaps sadly, will PR execs. For now.
Yet while there
is much debate over both the pace of these changes and their foreseeable
limits, nearly all commentators agree on though is that any future tech-driven capitalist
society will be divided between an ever-smaller elite of owners and specialists
on one hand and literally billions of dispossessed “surplus” humans on the
other. Rampant inequality, far worse than even today, will become the norm as a
world of abundance is skewed between utter excess for the few and deepening
scarcity for the many.
Martin
Ford’s research shows in some detail how this is already happening – the share
of surplus value paid to workers is falling rapidly as automation bites, even
in newly prosperous economies such as China. In the UK, the percentage of
national wealth distributed via employees’ wages has fallen by nearly a fifth
since the 1970s in spite of GDP more than doubling in real terms and
corporations raking in record returns. Under present conditions, this will
simply get worse. Traditional professions and training routes via university
courses and apprenticeships will be meaningless to individuals’ search for
employment and there will be little time to adapt or invent significant new
areas of work likely to generate well-paid work.
In this new
paradigm, the nightmare scenarios proliferate: will the rich elite exist
effectively in their own supra-economy, operating apart from the rest of
society, not unlike a virtual representation of the off-world gated community
of capitalists in the film Elysium? Or,
with their markets gone, will capitalists turn increasingly to the co-option of
state power to keep them afloat, perhaps finally shedding even the slightest
pretence of our current pseudo-democratic forms?
Though a
good number of the rich are reportedly buying up post-apocalyptic bolt-holes
for themselves, the second option seems for now the most likely and is probably
the most appealing for most capitalists. Under this, the State steps in to save
not capitalism, as it will be dead in even its most badly reanimated form, but
rather the capitalists themselves.
Neoliberalism
has excelled in the seizure of public power and resources to the benefit of
private companies and shareholders in the name of a non-existent free market.
Its final, climactic purpose as the suicidal capitalist system passes into
history, will be to cement the power of the final gang of owners of the world
into a new plutocratic royalty for the Third Millennium. And with yet more
irony, the leading advocates of one of the key economic measures to achieve
this rescue of the damned elite see themselves as radical challengers to the
very system that is set to incorporate their Big Idea.
That idea is
known by many names – unconditional basic income, citizens’ income, universal
credit among them – and has a diverse range of proponents. Broadly, the concept
is that, in a society where high-producing technology means there is not enough
human work to create big enough consumer markets to keep the economy
functioning, the State intervenes to make a regular payment to its citizens
which they can then use to purchase the essentials of life and, just maybe, a
little bit more. In this way, the economy keeps turning with some minimum level
of demand propping up the balance sheets of the big corporations.
There have
been various experiments with UBI including in Canada, the Netherlands and
Sweden, and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has recently announced UBI pilots
will take place in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife and North Ayrshire. Some of the oil
states, like contemporary Iran, provide a form of basic payment as a “dividend”
to the countries’ citizens from their natural resources, while South Africa
makes a healthcare payment (predominantly, but not exclusively, to women),
examined in James Fergusson’s Give A Man
A Fish, which is intended to ensure the well-being of the poorest.
In the UK, as
well as the SNP’s recent interest, the Greens have championed what they call Citizens’
Income, although they have done so in the teeth of vicious opposition from the
media and from Establishment politicians who derided it as at best utopian and
at worst a charter for the feckless. Given the psychological conditioning of
the public to believe that money must be earned via ideally full-time work, the
derision of the Greens as hopelessly idealistic struck a powerful chord with
many voters. But times change and the Green Party’s trail-blazing had led more
recently to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell considering it as an option for a
Corbynite social democracy.
Capitalists
have been relatively slow to advocate what, by the finest of Protestant work
ethics would be derided as the sin of free money. Yet some are gradually
concluding that it would be an effective means of saving capitalism from its
inherently self-destructive genetic code. Ford himself recommends it as the
basis for a new economy, though he argues that any basic income payment should
not be unconditional but dependent on recipients undertaking some sort of
currently unpaid community work, allegedly to avoid creation of a dependence
culture.
By contrast,
the left-wing argument for it as a dividend for sharing out the common wealth
(the “robot dividend”, perhaps) is
superficially appealing and even just. Much would of course depend on the level
of payment, whether or not it was truly unconditional and how it interplayed
with the rest of the economy. While ecosocialists argue it should not negate
measures such as living wage legislation, other allegedly progressive
proponents claim that a sufficiently high level UBI would remove the need for
any wage protection as people could simply refuse badly paid work – a rather unworldly
view of how the labour market works, especially in a world with huge surpluses
of workers.
And this is
the problem - by itself, UBI is just a tool and like any tool can be used to
very different ends. Alone it does nothing to challenge the inherent inequality
of capitalist society. It does nothing to rein in consumerist desire to pillage
our planet of its diminishing resources. It does nothing to wrest control or
ownership of the economy from the hands of a tiny elite – indeed, potentially
it does quite the opposite, providing a basic level of demand in an automated
economy, thwarting social change and locking citizens ever more into a system
that kindly doles out their “income”. It does
mark the end of capitalism as we have known it – nothing more will melt into
air and the nostrums of private ownership and bourgeois hierarchy will be frozen
like corpses in a morgue; and if we persist with a zombified market system, the
morgue will be where we will stay.
And in that
ossified condition, right-wing “libertarian” economist and author of “Average Is Over” Tyler Cowen salivates
that, “This is not a world where everyone
is going to feel comfortable…The world will look much more unfair and much less
equal; and indeed it will be.” While the rich control untold wealth
generated by automation, such human work as remains will be in serving their
whims: “Making high earners feel better
in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in
the future.”
So here
comes the challenge for socialists: do we back UBI as anything more than an
important but transitional arrangement to protect people from the worst ravages
of the transformation of our economy? As long as a monetary system continues, a
Citizens’ Income would be a useful method for ensuring a fair distribution of
wealth, but this would be a very different use to the idea of using it to keep
a market system ticking over in the absence of sufficient paid employment. So
do we focus instead on how to embrace and harness the powerful changes underway
to deliver a society where material abundance allows us to eventually do away
with markets and much, if for now not all, labour?
For Cowen’s
dystopian world is not the inevitable outcome of automation and improved A.I.
While acknowledging some inequality is driven by technological changes, Robert
Gordon stresses that this is because of a choice: previous post-war
technological advance led to greater equality and a much larger share of GDP
going to employees. But since the days of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, “The nature of innovation…has created a sort
of winner-takes-all society. Part of the
difference today is political.”
Back in 1965,
Bookchin posited:
“The question is whether a future
society will be organised around technology or whether technology is now
sufficiently malleable so that it can be organised around society.”
He was
writing in the days of giant mainframes and transistors – even something now as
antiquated as dialup networks using telephone cables would have seemed a
revolutionary fantasy to all but the most visionary. Where we are now,
exponentially on from Bookchin and several epochs from the steam and iron
contemporary to Marx and Engels, the needs of all can finally be met – but only
if we revolutionise the whole pattern of ownership and crucially of
distribution of goods and services.
Bookchin’s own
thinking was a synthesis of ecology, anarchism and socialism. His advocacy of
small-scale communities and communal ownership has become increasingly feasible
thanks to the decentralisation and specialisation permitted via ever more
flexible software programmes and technologies such as 3D printing. As we
urgently need to move to more localised economies in the face of resource
depletion and climate change, his ecosocialism has become all the more urgent
and essential too. In this, UBI will have a positive, transitional role to
play, but it should not be a long-term objective – because that should be
nothing any less audacious than removing markets from all but the smallest
scale economic activity, eventually removing the very need for money at all.
Imagine a
confederation of self-governing canton-like communities, using largely
automated technology to manufacture goods from local resources and then
distributing them according to need. Imagine a world where these communities are
largely self-sufficient but where the internet, renewable energy and low cost,
emission-free (driverless) public transport facilitates the exchange of items
of cultural interest or significance. Imagine a world where, rather than firing
and impoverishing half of us, technology has created a five-day weekend.
Imagine a world where people are free to explore their creativity and enjoy
leisure without guilt or capitalist concepts of being “time poor” or “debt-ridden”.
Psychologically, freed of the burden of want and the desire for acquisition,
society would seek out new ways to find human fulfilment, a society that
unleashes what Bookchin argued is the “basic
sense of decency, sympathy and mutual aid (which) lies at the core of human
behaviour.”
These are
all potential liberatory and egalitarian scenarios for the future of our
species and our world. But we won’t find our way to them under capitalism or
its pending Pluto-Corp PLC upgrade. For in this time of transition, or age of
disruption, one thing is for certain – capitalism has served its historical
purpose. Its relentless drive to put profit over people and planet has entered
a stage of such excess that it renders the system dysfunctional and for some
decades already only the deployment of the coercive powers of the very State have
shored up its beleaguered hold on society.
And all this
comes before we face the full, deep impact of the changes that are coming ever
faster on the horizon – changes which are just the first of many which will mark
this century far more profoundly and irreversibly than any that have come
before in the Anthropocene Era. For, far beyond anything anticipated by Ford,
Frey or Karl Marx, the nexus of genetic engineering and cybernetic biotechnology
threatens to transform the very core of what we consider to be human.
Yuval
Harari, author of “Sapiens: A Brief
History of Humankind”, warned in a 2015 New
Statesman essay that “They (the tech-elite)
dream not only about remaking society and the economy, but also about
overcoming old age, defeating death, engineering superhumans, creating the
Internet of Things and merging human beings into the Internet of Things to form
some kind of cosmic consciousness.”
Google has
set up a Life Sciences investment company charged with a mission “to solve death”, while PayPal founder
Peter Thiel is investing a chunk of his $2.2 billion fortune in research to
upgrade humans and fight mortality. Much may be fantasy, but just as the
potential of material utopia finally really does cleave into view, so too does
the prospect of the rebirth of eugenics and its appalling consequences.
Harari
berates the managerialism of contemporary mainstream politics, with myopic
leaders rarely lifting their eyes from the four or five years ahead and, by
default, ceding the great visions of tomorrow to the plutocratic geeks
quartered in Silicon Valley. “The most
important decisions in the history of life might be taken by a tiny group of
engineers and business people, while politicians are busy arguing about
immigration quotas and the euro.”
We need
visionary politics more than ever. We need a politics that transcends hustling
for cyclical elections to powerless legislatures that are bogged down between
bureaucratic paralysis and the bullying of the Establishment. No more
gradualism or liberalism or even social democracy. We no longer have the time. Now,
more than ever, we face the stark but very real choice espoused nearly a
century ago by Rosa Luxemburg: that of socialism or barbarism.
The socialism
of a society where the great bounty of commonly-owned technology is equitably
and sustainably shared among the inhabitants of our planet. A society where
work is much reduced, replaced by leisure and learning, and where clean energy,
an economy of the Commons and social justice keep Homo Sapiens safe, in some balance with the natural world and ready
to finally fulfil all that we can be.
Or,
alternatively, the barbarism of a pseudo-capitalist dystopia where the elite
shore up their decaying economics by employing the very tech that could free us
all to instead bind us with ever more virtual chains, weighing us down with
suspicion and surveillance as our world is racked by resource depletion and climate
change. A world where the genetically modified, trans-human inheritors of capitalism
will soon enough build that Internet of Things, a veritable Skynet, in the profane
name of public wellbeing and national security. And somewhere, arguing that if
they don’t do it, a competitor will instead, someone will build a Terminator.
And it won’t
have an OFF switch.
“In a future revolution, the most
pressing task of technology will be to produce a surfeit of goods with a
minimum of toil. The immediate purpose of this task will be to open the social
arena permanently to the revolutionary people, to keep the revolution in
permanence. Thus far, every social revolution has foundered because the peal of
the tocsin could not be heard over the din of the workshop. Dreams of freedom
and plenty were polluted by the mundane, workday responsibility of producing
the means of survival…. The most critical function of modern technology must be
to keep the doors of the revolution open forever!”
-
Murray Bookchin, “Towards A
Liberatory Technology”
NB - this article originally appeared in
The Point, online Scottish socialist journal.
Bibliography
“The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the
Threat of Mass Unemployment” by Martin Ford, Basic Books, New York, 2015
“Seventeen
Contradictions and the End of Capitalism” by David Harvey, Profile Books,
London, 2014
“Inventing the Future: Post-Capitalism and a
World Without Work” by Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Verso, London,
2015
Articles
“Who owns the future?” article by Yuval
Harari, “New Statesman” magazine,
12-18 June 2015
“You’re Next” article by John McDermott,
“Prospect” magazine, April 2014
“Immigrants from the Future” Special
Report, The Economist, 29 March 2014
Tories test disabled people to check if they are lying; Jesus healed them without questioning them.
