Our social systems, our hierarchical obsessions, the increasing concentration of wealth and power among a very few – these things are driving our uncomfortable relationship with AI.

How we manage the next revolution doesn’t have to be a societal nightmare with benefits eventually trickling down from the few to the many.

We sell our time, we sell our labour, sometimes we have to sell our bodies, sometimes we have to get money in ways we would rather not. But we accept that there is a distinction between making money, however you do it – and being money.

Getting rid of what the great economist and anthropologist David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’ is not anything to mourn.

Although the inner life is developed through a relationship with externals – whether it’s books, art or nature, philosophy or religion – the inner life is a private place.

Socialism need not position itself as the polar opposite of capitalism. Socialism can temper the excesses, challenge the bull-headed free-market mantra. The market is not God. And, while markets may correct their own excesses in the long run, as Maynard Keynes remarked, ‘in the long run we are all dead.’

The word Luddite still means an old-fashioned type who is anti-progress. But the Luddites of the early 19th century were not against progress; they were against exploitation.

Exceptional women, like exceptional men, lead the world forward – but if we get caught up in the exceptionalism narrative, we are in danger of dragging an out-of-date story into a future waiting to be told.

Love is far from an anti-intellectual response. Love demands every resource we can muster – our creativity, our imagination, our compassion, as well as our smart, shiny, thinking self. Love is the totality. No one, at the end of life, regrets love.