The the Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. The usual two guests today.

Yasha Levine will tell us about the many continuity

between Nazi collaborators in Ukraine during World War II and today's proxy war against

Russia.

And Lizzi O'Shea will review the history of techno-utopianism and help us think about a renovated

digital commons inspired by the Paris Commune.

Before that, I want to say a few words about the robot revolution, a topic that comes up in my

interview with Lizzie O'Shea, I'm a skeptic.

By that I don't mean to argue that IT and AI and all the other abbreviations and

acronyms aren't changing our world profoundly. They are. TAC effects everything, work,

play, love, politics, art, all of it. But the maximalist version, where robots equipped with

AI, are going to replace human workers, that's another story. No doubt they will replace some, but

not all. back in 1987 ancient history and

Tech Time the economist Robert Solo observed you can see the computer age everywhere

But in the productivity statistics that rose to the level of a

cliche but it was true. Productivity measured as the dollar value of the

output per hour of work adjusted for inflation fell below its long-term average in

the mid-1970s, one of the many signs of the

end of the post-World War II Golden Age and would stay there for 20 years.

Then around 1995, productivity accelerated with the commercialization of the internet and the dot-com boom.

Solo's quip was retired and the dawn of a new era was pronounced.

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