Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. In today's episode of History of Ideas,

bought you in partnership with the London Review of Books, David explores the strange world of

Samuel Butler's heroine, a topsy-turvy classic of Victorian fiction and an eerie prophecy of

machine intelligence. If the machine starts to control us, who or what will control the machines?

One minor theme in the political thought of the 19th century is the role of New Zealand

in particularly the English political imagination, because New Zealand was the furthest place away

from Britain, and it was just being colonised, people were going there, crossing the earth,

and so it symbolised not just the other side of the world, but a place from which it might be

possible to see the world upside down or to see things that couldn't be seen from inside

British society. So part of the reason New Zealand acquired this symbolic role was because

of a famous line written by the historian Thomas McCauley in an essay in 1840, in which he speculated

about a future in which the British Empire that was just reaching its glory days was in ruins,

indeed British society, British civilisation had gone over the top and fallen apart,

and he wrote, I quote here, about that day on which some traveller from New Zealand

shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch

the ruins of St Paul's. So the New Zealander became shorthand for the person who would come and see

the ruins of what had once been a great civilisation, that there was a part of the world where the

thing that existed before would exist after. But New Zealand also played a role as the place

from which it was possible to imagine things that would be harder to imagine from inside

Western European British Imperial society. A role that it slightly plays still to this day,

I mean for many people New Zealand is primarily the land of Lord of the Rings, this strange

familiar but also slightly airy landscape, New Zealand is still a place where some of the most

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