Radical Essay: How Is Technology Changing Our Lives? (A 2025 Review)

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you believe it? This beautiful little contribution to civilisation, a visualised podcast, what we used to call television, called Radical, isn't so little anymore.

0:52We have been going for six months, 29 episodes and nearly 100 hours of golden audio. And you know what? It's gone really well. really well. That is very, very satisfying and it is thanks to you. I know there are an infinite number of claims on your time and attention. So the fact that you have given so much of both to us, honestly, it is humbling. And I have to say it is the level of engagement, the feedback, the questions, the love, which is most pleasing. That is why we've started doing Your Radical Questions, which drops on a Monday and is your chance to engage very directly and really connect with our brilliant guests.

1:34In fact, we've had so many questions that I reckon, I reckon those episodes should be quite a bit longer. But the old pod squad, those wonderful people on the other side of the glass, have overruled me on that one and I want to be nice about it because, you know, it's Christmas after all.

1:56Look, today as a little festive audio gift from us to you, I just wanted to draw together a few threads of what I feel I've learned from the fantastic guests that we have had on Radical so far, really about the times that we live in. Those times, this zeitgeist is our great concern. We're doing something hard on Radical. We're avoiding the temptations of confirmation bias. We're asking you to engage with people from across the political spectrum who you might not agree with. And we're going really deep on big ideas. After this, we've got some other highlights from what has been a lovely ride, and I'll save my season's greetings for then.

2:35And if you're really, really lucky, I might even sing a little song for you, a little festive treat. But first, the good stuff.

2:47Perhaps the great question of our age is whether the Promethean technology, now loosed upon the world, augments and improves what it is to be human, or, on the contrary, degrades and damages our species, undermining our minds, our childhoods and the bonds between us on the way. This, rather than existential wipeout, is the danger we all need to be alert to. AI is not like anything we've seen before. All technologies hitherto invented were subject to human control and human mastery. But AI makes its own decisions and has its own ideas, albeit based on the infinitely rich soup of human data available online.

3:31In basic problem solving, AI already easily outperforms most humans in most cognitive tasks. This is why some historians argue that human history has ended, or is about to. Not history, not humanity, both of those are still with us I think, given you're listening to this podcast, but human history, that chapter in the passage of this ball of rock and gas in which the minds of we sapiens was the biggest determinant of events on the surface of the earth. Now there are, in effect, other non-human minds among us, and there is undoubtedly a sense in which we are competing with them for agency over our common future.

4:13If we are not careful, we could go from being in control to being controlled. To paraphrase Grace Jones' great tune, we could become slave to the algorithm. On current form, on several fronts, our contributors fear that things are not going too well. I'll get to the positive case for AI because it is thrilling, plausible and so worth pursuing. But on Radical, our guests have articulated very clearly and with great erudition the ways in which we are mismanaging this relationship. Our first guest, the feminist campaigner and author Laura Bates, made clear that AI opens up a new front in the war on sexism.

4:54That is, it promotes misogyny. A sense of entitlement to women's bodies and the idea that being able to take any woman in the world and make her your pornographic plaything, create a video of her doing anything you want to do, creates that sense of ownership. So one of the consequences, when a technology makes a product universally accessible, one thing is that it's easier for adults to get a range of things and often cheaper, but it's also easier for kids to get it. And one of the things that's really extraordinary is the extent to which kids who are very young, not even teenagers, are able through the internet and through AI, which often AI technology doesn't have age restrictions on it.

5:35This is one of the weird things. So Instagram, you're meant to be 13. TikTok is meant to be rules and regulations in place. artificial intelligence is proliferating at such a rate that they are AI tools, which just don't have age restrictions. So if you've got a kid who's 11 and has a smartphone, as huge numbers of children do in the UK, because they go to secondary school and their parents are worried that they might miss out and blah, blah, blah. You've actually got a social phenomenon where millions of children have access to violent pornography for free. Yeah. It's an astonishing thing for any society to allow to happen, isn't it?

6:10and to create their own pornography of their female peers. In that interview, which you can go back and listen to in the Radical Feed, Laura praised the musician Jordan Stevens for the work he's been doing as an advocate for boys and young men. For a growing number of young people, porn is really their first encounter with sexuality of any kind. There's also growing evidence both of appalling practices in porn, such as choking, and the real-world incidence of such practices growing. It doesn't require much detective work to decipher where this is coming from. I was shocked, for instance, to discover that, according to one study, 40 % of women between the ages of 25 and 29 say that they have been choked during intercourse, which is why Jordan Stevens reckons we need sex education that is fit for the digital age.

6:59I think it would really help boys and men to have a more open discussion about how to engage with porn in a healthy way, not to dismiss it, not to repress, not to shame, but to understand that a lot of porn isn't real life. And that is in keeping with what I want to do, which is constantly try and align myself and create spaces for boys and men to reimagine and re-engage with these little secret convos. Everything around sex, especially with men, seems so secretive. Even talking about penises is like, ugh. Talking about masturbation, There's no cultural, no television, no film, no nothing points about sexual maturity, development, like barely anything.

7:41Don't you think we've made progress on that? No, not in terms of, not in terms of, like, I'm talking about like cultural touch points, like big series. Okay, I would love you to give me one example of a TV show. Can't, I was just thinking. Yeah, there isn't. I'm trying to write it, by the way. What are you trying to write? A TV show? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's all I love. But my point is, the reason why I think these boys will operate and engage with something as extreme even some of the porn we see in private is because where's the space that discuss it outside of it? Partly as a parent, my fear about AI is that because it is just so brilliant at thinking, and because as Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler told us, if you want to encourage people to do something, make it easy, AI might end up replacing so much human thinking.

8:23That is, thinking becomes a luxury activity, a kind of indulgence for those who have the motivation not to be lazy. If this sounds fanciful, if the idea that we're stumbling into a golden age of stupidity sounds a bit alarmist, how do we explain the shocking falls in the number of people reading for pleasure? You know, arguably the most exciting British children's author of her generation, Catherine Rundle, knows the problem all too well. We seem to have reached a moment in which the habit of reading and the sense of reading being something that the majority of children might do has been lost.

9:00And that is a staggering loss, both because, so these reports are brought out by the brilliant National Literacy Trust, which is a superb charity that does work promoting literacy. They bring it out every year. And every year we've seen these declines over the last, particularly since COVID. One of the things that they are always keen to iterate is this isn't inevitable. And it's not irreversible. and it's not something that we should treat as if it was just a natural step in the culture we're in. We need to treat it like a crisis and like a crisis that can absolutely be reversed. Like if I could have a magic wand and make one change, I think it would be insisting that every school, both primary and secondary, but especially primary, has a library and that it is assessed as part of your Ofsted criteria and that it is staffed by a librarian.

9:55because one of the things about, you know, the teachers in this country do spectacular work. I've met many of them because I go to a lot of schools. But a lot of them don't always have a completely up-to-date sense of what books are out there for the kids because they're very busy. But a librarian could make sure that we were stacking when we were filling these shelves, not just all the great classics that we all adored, but also stuff that was out yesterday. You know, we need, of course, we need Frank Cultural Boys and we need The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, but we also need Sharna Jackson.

10:24and we need, you know, have brilliant high-rise mystery stories. We need people who, you know, ideally we'd have a bit of Marcus Rashford and his non-fiction book because one of the things in that report, the National Literature Report said was, how do you get kids to read? Allow them to read their interests. And if your interest is football, you will need some books by footballers. By the way, shortly after she came on our podcast, Catherine signed a mega bucks deal with Disney, who want to bring her Impossible Creatures series to screen. Now, I'm not saying, I'm not saying, I'm not saying it was Radical what done it, that Radical secured that lucrative deal with Disney boss Bob Iger.

11:03But well, you know, who knows? Seriously, congratulations, Catherine, and a very big and very heartfelt personal thank you from me because that book, Impossible Creatures 1, that is, really lit a spark for my son, Winston, who absolutely devoured it. Reading is in decline in large part because of the smartphone. Whereas a century ago, mass literacy spread like wildfire, the dominant media form today is really short form video. In an episode which I happen to know from impeccable sources went mildly viral in the upper echelons of British media. Jordan Schwarzenberger, manager of Europe's biggest YouTube phenomenon, The Sidemen, explained how TikTok's algorithm changed modern culture.

11:44TikTok emerging and blowing up and creating an algorithm that was so smart that it could understand you by how long you spend on a video totally shifted the entire landscape of culture in a way that I think we're still not really grasping as much as we should be. Why did it do that? Because it changed the behavior of consumers online and viewers online from being around editorial consumption to for you page consumption. So previously, again, I was in this world for many years before, Lab Bible, Vice, etc. You had publishers who were able to effectively control the cultural conversation because they were broadcast through social media as you would do news.

12:24It was a news feed in many ways. And you had some influencers and some creators, but very not tons, but some. but everything was driven by your following. So you were capped in your following as an audience. So if you had a big reputation before, if you were New York Times, whatever, you'd have a big following, you would then reach a lot of people. But there wasn't this notion of discovery and for you page. TikTok comes along and breaks all of that because the algorithm now is about you training it to tell you what you want it to show you. You're the boss. You're the boss, you're God in your world of culture.

12:54So what that means is fast forward. Oh, wow, TikTok's really popular. Instagram copies it and does the same thing with Reels. YouTube copies it and does the same thing with shorts. And now you've got shorts, you were YouTube, biggest video search engine in the world, not social media, but biggest video search engine in the world. And you have Instagram and Meta, biggest social business in the world. Now playing catch up with TikTok. So you have the three, the whole, the, I guess, the oligarchy of social media, of cultural connection, which we had, which is really the interface of the internet.

13:27Social is the interface of the internet. The three big ones are all shifting from follower-based feeds to discovery for you page feeds. Totally different world. One of the ways in which AI has already completely transformed our lives, without most of us realising it, is through the reimagination of online search. According to Matthew Prince, boss of cybersecurity giant Cloudflare, the launch of Google's AI mode was a turning point in modern history because it turned Google's main consumer tool from a search engine to an answer engine. Once upon a time, if you searched, I don't know, how handsome is Amal Rajan, just on the off chance for instance, you'd get a load of links offering different sources and source material.

14:12You had to investigate those links and make up your own mind as to what the answer might be. Now, Google's AI mode does the thinking for you. Yet again, artificial intelligence substitutes human thinking. For Matthew Prince, whose company serves an astonishing 6 billion users a day and provides critical infrastructure for around a quarter of the internet, this change destroys the business model of all those people who spent the past 20 years trying to get you to click on those links. The internet's going through a massive transition right now. And I think that transition is inevitable because at the end of the day, it's better for users.

14:55And you can actually see it by just watching any sci-fi movie. Some sci-fi movie, you imagine, has a helpful robot and you say, I'd like a recipe for cookies. The robot doesn't come back and say, here are 10 links and maybe you can find it somewhere. The robot comes back and says, here's a recipe for cookies. And that once upon a time was science fiction. But if you look at the AI companies today, you look at something like ChatGPT, you look at Anthropic, you look even at what Google is becoming where they're putting AI overviews at the top of the page. Instead of it being a search engine, this is becoming an answer engine.

15:27And the difference of that is that if you want to say, okay, what did Amal talk about on his podcast today? The answer engine will tell you this is what the future is going to look like. I don't think we can hold back progress. If that should worry those of you who've built businesses based on web traffic or digital advertising, what of the rest of us? In a caveated, calibrated, careful warning, Dario Amadei, the boss of AI giant Anthropic, told us he reckons that in the coming years, up to half of white collar entry level jobs in professions like finance, law, administration could be wiped out.

16:09I'm not saying we're fated for the bad outcomes, but if we don't handle this well, I am worried that that fast growth could be coupled with job displacement for a lot of people, that you could get a much bigger pie, but also that pie could be concentrated more in a smaller number of people. And there could be some people who don't get any. That is my concern. And specifically, if we look at jobs like, as you said, entry level white collar work. You know, I think of people who work at law firms like first year associates. There's a lot of document review. It's very repetitive, but every example is different.

16:51That's something that AI is quite good at. There is a desire to use AI to do this very wide range of tasks. Yes, to augment their workers. But I think, to be honest, a large fraction of them would like to be able to use it to cut costs, to employ less people. Meanwhile, for Nick Clegg, who you may recall was the deputy prime minister, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the coalition government, but also spent years at the top of Facebook and its parent company Meta. Well, he has written this book called How to Save the Internet. And in his view, the really striking thing is that we have almost completely failed to learn the lessons from the past 20 years.

17:33What we experience online is a very great speed mutating from something that was driven by humans. It was content that humans would generate, good, bad, lovely, ugly. to content that is synthetically generated and algorithmically recommended to you. So these great platforms, which is actually one of the reasons I was always, if unfashionably, defenders of them, they were platforms for human expression, human content, human connection will increasingly become pipelines for algorithmically recommended entertainment content, where we as humans become, if you like, more passive recipients of both synthetically generated content, which is then automatically recommended to us.

18:26And here's the irony of ironies. I think a lot of the critique of what I call social media one was wrong and was wider the mark because I think it underestimated how much agency humans had. But weirdly enough, it's a critique that I think is coming into its own. or will do as we move into a more synthetic environment. Sir Nick, as I probably ought to call him, though I can't quite get used to the idea, Sir Nick reminded me of that great line from the historian AJP Taylor, who joked that the only thing we learn from the mistakes of the past is how to make fresh mistakes. When I asked Clegg to address head on the mission of radical and describe the trends that will redefine what it is to be human in the coming years, I was very, very struck by his use of the phrase synthetic intelligence, as well as his warning about it.

19:18I think this trend of what I call in the book, the power paradox, that these technologies empower us, but aggregate and concentrate so much power into the hands of the people who run these industries. I think that's going to happen with knobs on because we're all going to certainly if that's you listen to anyone really from Dario Amadei to Elon Musk. It doesn't matter what sort of spectrum they come from in terms of the debate around AI. They're all aiming for the same thing, which is that we all end up becoming very dependent on agentic AI, on AIs that do everything from help us cook, plan our holiday, to share our deepest, darkest fears and thoughts and so on.

19:54Agentics in agents or assistants. Correct. And so you're going to have a level of personalized dependency on AI entities, which are synthetic entities, which is quite, quite different to being connected with another human being via Facebook, you know, circa five years ago, which is certainly the industry I worked in at that time. and yet at the same time of course that the underlying physics that produces that very personal feel you know that very personal agentic ai call them bob call them susan who may even appear in very realistic sort of avatar form to us soon will be based on a technology which is very very centralizing at its source the coming desecration or wipeout of so many jobs should keep a lot of people up at night.

20:43And I think one of the most neglected aspects of this is what it does for social mobility. Those entry level white collar jobs were the means by which in decades past, young people from poorer backgrounds could pull themselves out of poverty and up the ladder of opportunity, pay and esteem. You know, one of the real challenges for us, and I must say for me, because I'm a cheery sort of bloke, as you probably worked out by now, it's just, you know, keeping our collective spirits up. That is hard when there is a lot to worry about. And it's particularly hard given Britain's recent performance and its immediate prospects.

21:19In one of our most popular episodes, clips of which have gone completely viral, the historian Dr Eliza Philby gave us a brilliant pithy description of how Britain has made life so much harder for young people in recent years. It comes down to what I think of as the three Ps, pay, property and pensions. So inheritocracy is a deliberately provocative title, the antidote to a meritocracy, the belief that hard work will result in success and opportunity. And inheritocracy is a society on which it's not what you're earning or learning, but whether you have access to the bank of mum and dad that is defining your opportunity, your safety net and your springboard into adulthood.

22:00And that has really been the story that's defined millennials since the 2008 financial crisis, which we go into, and increasingly now Gen Z, and I believe possibly Gen Alpha, our kids. Which is why, according to Dr. Philby, if you want to get on, don't look for that guy who works in finance. Marry a guy whose dad was in finance, right? Because actually what we're talking about here is not marrying someone of wealth through wage, but marrying another family with wealth. Terrific episode, that one. It really was. And in fact, Dr. Philby alighted on a theme that her fellow academic, Dr. Paul Morland, described very powerfully in an early episode in July.

22:41I would say this, but I can't think of anywhere that you'll find a clearer, sharper or more urgent analysis of how Britain's demography, that is the makeup of its population, its people, has changed very, very suddenly from young to old and ethnically homogenous to unprecedentedly diverse. with huge implications, not just for who we are, but whether we can afford the lifestyles that we've been accustomed to. We have this idea of the welfare state. We have a deeply embedded idea that the world that existed in the 19th century, where the state more or less left you to your own devices, and if you were hungry, maybe there's a poor house if you're lucky.

23:19If you needed a doctor and you couldn't afford it too bad, obviously there were charities and so on. That world became unacceptable in the course of the 20th century. The idea that people are not left to their own devices, that there is a health service, there is some kind of social care, that we don't just leave people alone to figure it out, has become deeply embedded. Now, I don't know how that can continue when you have the kind of demographic pyramid we're heading to. The example I always give is Japan, but we're not that far behind. In the 60s, seven to eight workers per retiree, 100 million people.

23:58Population goes up, low fertility population goes down. When it gets back to 100 million in the 40s, 2040s or 50s, not seven or eight workers, but one worker per retiree. Now, when you get to that level, I don't know how you have a tax system. I don't know how you have a fiscal arrangement. I don't know how you have a welfare state that can actually function when you've got one person of working age to every retiree in Britain. We're at about three now, going a bit below three. We're heading to two. When will we hit two? Good question. Depends on immigration, but yeah. Probably the 2050s or 2060s, something like that.

24:34Look, if all this AI demographic decline, whatever it may be, If it all seems to add up occasionally to an avalanche of anxiety-inducing horrors, it really needn't be. The whole point, and the whole point of this podcast, is that it's up to us, collectively, to fulfil our potential and to mitigate our maladies. That is what we are trying constantly to do on Radical. Look for actual, workable solutions. Not quick fixes, but radical ideas and honesty about the trade-offs involved. Next year, we're going to really emphasise those and offer a really safe space not just for those radical ideas, but heresies that deserve a hearing.

25:12For now, I think we should remember two things. First, for most of humanity, there has, on almost every conceivable measure, never been a better time to be alive. And second, our species really stands at an inflection point or crossroads, and it falls to us to choose the better path. As Yogi Berra said, when you see a fork in the road, take it. In a moment, I'll have a very brief run through of some other great highlights over the past few months. For now, I can do no better than end this particular argument by quoting, or rather playing for you, the conclusion of the inaugural Wreath Lectures.

25:48They were given by my hero, Bertrand Russell. Russell was a huge influence on my dear departed dad and therefore on me. At the end of his sixth and final lecture in 1948, Russell captured perfectly that sense of an inflection point, a crossroads brought to humanity by the very technology that it had created. In the world in which we find ourselves, the possibilities of good are almost limitless, and the possibilities of evil no less so. Our present predicament is due more than anything else to the fact that we have learned to understand and control to a terrifying extent the forces of nature outside us, but not those that are embodied in ourselves.