Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC

Sounds.

Thanks for downloading this special edition of The Inquiry, featuring for the first time just

one expert witness. You'll see why.

We have an ideas meeting for the inquiry every week.

We sit by the window, notebooks in hand, talking, sometimes arguing.

We often discuss things we've read, and lately we've found our conversations have been coming back again and again to some big ideas

we found in two books in particular.

Eventually, it dawned on us.

Let's just interview the author.

Yewval Noah Harare has written the best-selling books, Sapiens and Homodeus. He's a historian who looks to the future.

You don't study the past for the sake of the past. You study the past in order to understand the present and the future better.

Technology, he thinks, could change not only our world, but our species. The changes he describes could, among other things, create

new winners and losers and exaggerate the differences between them. In other words, technological change could massively

amplify inequality.

We asked Yoval Harare to tell us how he thinks that could happen and he agreed so we have only one

expert witness this week but he has plenty to say.

...