Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're talking to Paul Mason, author, journalist, filmmaker, about his new book which is nothing less than a radical defense of the human being.

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Paul came up to Cambridge to record this conversation on Wednesday morning. We're joined also by Helen Thompson. There is an enormous amount in this book. It's about what it means to be human, it's also about what it means to be political, what it means to be on the left, what it means to be a Marxist.

We're going to try and cover quite a lot of that but it's primarily a book about human beings in the new machine age, the age of digital technology and that's where we started.

A big theme in the book is that we have kind of mystified digital technology and we need to demystify it. We've imbued it with these kind of magical qualities. We often believe that it has powers that we've lost control over and you want us to remember that these are machines or tools even.

And human beings built these things and we can decide how to use them. So just tell us a bit about how you think we've mystified these things but also what the demystification looks like.

Well it was very struck by Galileo's first ever book on mechanics where he writes, I'm surrounded by people who don't know how machines work. At the time, exact contemporaries of Galileo were writing a machine is a thing for defying nature.

And so Galileo just sets to work with his geometry and shows in these 30 pages that indeed a machine is a thing for channeling the forces of nature. Galileo performs in this book the first demystification act.

He says look a machine simply transforms energy, energy in energy out but in a different form. And I was struck by when reading that by the similarity to what Smith does in the wealth of nations.

So Smith says look machines are not creating any of the value. It's the labor that is creating an embodying value in the product. And you can really see that if you go to Kirk-Korri and you think about him, little workshop watching some early steam engine being made.

You can see that it's the people that add the value. So I thought well one thing we have to do about computers is to demystify what they are.

They are machines, software is a machine, a silicon chip is just a machine with the trillion switches that don't move. They neither produce value nor that they produce energy nor do they produce information.

But they do produce vast amounts of utility by transforming the information that goes into them.

Now if you look at it like that, what are you up against? Weirdly, you're up against a heck of a lot of scientists in rocket science, in cosmology, in subatomic physics.

But I've tended to indulge in the metaphysical belief that the universe is a computer. Much like a scientist said you look at carbon to look at the moon and assumes this must be made of wood.

Modern science is full of assertion about reality that likens it to a computer. I just thought no, no, we create them. We can decide what they do.

And we have at the very least the right to a debate about our right to control them.

But what we don't have is the ability to go to Cacodian C, the demystification that comes with actually finding a site where you can watch the machinery in motion.

So part of the mystique of these things is there is something really opaque going on.

What Galileo does and what Smith does, but even more Marx, when Marx I think perfects the labor theory of value, which is what we're talking about, is you have to use abstraction because Marx says in the preface to Das Kapital, you can't perform a chemical experiment on capitalism, you can't refract it, you can't break it down into its elements.

What you have to do is use the power of abstraction to work out what's going on. And I think that what technology is doing is transformative for life on this planet.

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