Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia – but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. Why did nobody listen?

One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn’t have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It’s as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can’t put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can’t stop, or look back, or think straight.

But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. It comes from somewhere. It wasn’t inevitable. Things could have turned out differently. They still can. And if you look back, one thing you’ll see is that a lot of people saw this all coming. They foresaw our present when it was still the future. They thought it might turn out fabulously, a computer utopia. And they worried it might turn out disastrously. Above all, they issued warning after warning about the rise of what I call the artificial state, the replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, the consent of the governed, with the rule of people by machines. They warned of a future in which democratic deliberation would be replaced by prediction by calculation, the public sphere would be supplanted by data-driven commerce, and drones would take the place of the demos. Why didn’t anyone listen?

The new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorise, and reproduce this information at the press of a button. Most of these people are highly educated, many of them are PhDs, and none that I have met have malignant political designs on the American public. They may, however, radically reconstruct the American political system, build a new politics, and even modify revered and venerable American institutions – facts of which they are blissfully innocent.

Decades after being sexually abused, the author and doctor Frank Spinelli believed he had moved on emotionally. But alcohol destroyed his sense of security. He describes how he confronted his shame

Not so long ago, Frank Spinelli seemed to have sorted out his life. He was happily married, working as a doctor and had a sideline writing medical thrillers. He thought he had dealt with the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child – not only had he helped bring the man who groomed and abused him to justice, but also he had written a memoir about it. “I felt that I had closure,” he says. “I had the good fortune of working with some amazing therapists and I believed I had done the work and moved past it and I was a healed person.”

Little did he know that his recovery was fragile. The Covid pandemic took away his routine and structure: “All the external pillars that were tightly holding me together – the engagements at the office, the work trips.” Two years earlier, he and his husband had moved from Manhattan to a leafy suburb, from where he is speaking to me over a video call today. He was dealing with uncertainty and felt isolated. “We know one thing about shame: shame breeds in isolation.”

The PM’s net zero pragmatism may please some voters, but as parts of the country go up in flames, it’s an increasingly hard sell

When the siren sounded on Friday night, my first thought was fire.

Weeks of unrelenting sun in the normally soggy Peak District, where I was visiting my mum, have bleached green valleys a dangerously dry, crispy blond. One of her neighbours had earlier pointed out an ominous cloud of smoke on the horizon, coming from one of the wildfires raging all summer on the moor. When that harsh, discordant shriek blared from every mobile phone in the house, I was half-braced for an evacuation order, not what turned out to be a faintly melodramatic warning to the nation to lay off the barbecues. A false alarm, of sorts, but one that felt uneasily like a wake-up call.

With abs like Olympians and skin like hide, pole dancers are besieging the Edinburgh fringe. We meet four high-flying, physics-defying acts tackling everything from New York’s underbelly to neurodiversity

If you tell someone in Edinburgh you’re going to see a pole dancing show, they might direct you towards the so-called Pubic Triangle, where the city’s strip clubs are. But there’s more to pole dance than that – and it’s popping up in theatre shows across the fringe this year. Not only do these acts show off amazing physical feats, they also tell stories that range from one woman’s HIV diagnosis, to the relationship between a neurodivergent mother and son.

Since the boom of the 1990s, when Zoe Ball famously had a pole in her living room, pole has been taught at dance studios, has become a competition sport – there’s a campaign to get it into the Olympics – and made its way from cabaret stages to theatres. It’s an impressive and fiendishly difficult art.

Nearly a decade after fighting ended in northern Iraq, the climate crisis has brought extreme heat and a water shortage, making life almost impossible

The first thing that strikes visitors arriving in Faka, a small village in Sinjar district, northern Iraq, is the silence. No children play in the streets. No shops are open. Roofless houses stretch across the hillside, their walls pockmarked by shellfire, while weeds and wild grasses grow through collapsed living rooms.

A decade after Islamic State (IS) swept across the region, war remains visible everywhere. But according to the people who returned, another enemy has quietly taken its place.

Rajab Mohammed says the problem in his village of Faka is no longer Islamic State but water and jobs

From wacky versions of The ABC Song to Quentin Blake’s eccentric Mrs Armitage, these five shows offer fun for young audiences

Underbelly until 31 August

Study finds older adults could face harmful heat stress at just 1.5C of warming above preindustrial levels

People aged 60 and over face dangers to their health from exposure to heat at much lower temperatures than previously thought, research has found.

Older adults will bear the brunt of increasingly frequent sustained spells of extreme heat globally as the world continues to warm up, according to a study in The Lancet Public Health.

Open letter signed by 40 academics including Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz and Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level

Forty prominent progressive academics are urging Andy Burnham’s government to join a new global push to tackle inequality.

The experts include Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz, University College London professor Mariana Mazzucato, vice-chancellor of the London School of Economics Larry Kramer, and Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level.

Many buyers wait in hope of better deal, although there are hotspots in Scotland and northern England

Half of homes in Great Britain are taking longer to sell than last year as volatile conditions in the mortgage market amid the Iran war prompt buyers to “wait and see” if they can get a better deal, according to a report.

As the Middle East conflict continues to unfold, the property platform Zoopla said homes in 180 out of 363 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales were taking longer to sell compared with a year ago.

Exclusive: Prison officers’ union strongly opposes HMP Millsike offering flexible work escorting prisoners amid staff shortages

Andy Burnham is under pressure to intervene in a privately run prison that is seeking to recruit custody officers on zero-hours contracts for the first time across England and Wales’ prison estate.

Managers at HMP Millsike, a category C prison for 1,500 prisoners near York operated by the outsourcing company Mitie, have signed off online adverts for £25-an-hour prisoner escort roles “on a flexible, task-based basis”.