The twenty-first century economy is a rapidly evolving creature. What with automation, driverless cars, drones, aviation, the app economy, and social media, among other things, how we live and think about economic output is being transformed — causing no end of questions about labor market productivity. You'd think we're living in an age where such economic development and creativity go unrestricted by the hands of government. Yet government is attempting to regulate it. When you read a new study out of theMercatus Center that government has regulated innovation out of the economy to the tune of $4 trillion less growth from 1980 to 2012, you wonder: what would attempted regulation of these exciting new industries lead to? What will America lose?

Here to discuss these sectors and the specter of government regulation is Eli Dourado, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of its Technology Policy Program. He specializes in Internet governance, intellectual property, cryptocurrency, Internet security, and the economics of technology. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Ars Technica, and Wired, among other outlets, and is a member of the State Department's International Telecommunication Advisory Committee and has served on several U.S. delegations to UN treaty and policy conferences.

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Recently quite a lot has been made of the tech world's involvement in politics — from accusations that social media sites such asFacebook are politically biased, to questions over certain Silicon Valley leaders' endorsements, to wondering whether VP picks could sway these very influential donors and public figures to one candidate or another. Some figures on the right bemoan that Silicon Valley tends to go blue. However, Silicon Valley boasts a unique culture that emerges from an environment of competition, innovation, and collaboration. As my guest Greg Ferenstein has written, these "hippies who dig capitalism and science" - many of them millennials - are hard to label as Democrat or Republican. They go with the public policies that make their ventures possible.

So what is the "political philosophy" of Silicon Valley? And what do these tech leaders want from public policy? Here to discuss is Greg Ferenstein, a California based writer, editor of the Ferenstein Wire, and author of The Age Of Optimists, a free book on Silicon Valley’s political endgame, available on Medium.

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Almost 200 years after Mary Shelley made AI an object of fear and awe in Frankenstein, humanity is looking at a proliferation of super-smart creations: robots. As tech and publishing guru Kevin Kelly writes in his brand new book The Inevitable, out in June, automated technology of all sorts - from industrial to humanoid to seemingly harmless conveyors of "artificial smartness" - will soon transform our lives. (Some already have, like your calculator, the automatic braking in your cars, or Siri). But need we fear it? Will AI take our jobs away? Or will robots, by handling all the mechanics and rote work necessary for economic productivity, liberate us to be more creative, caring and "humanly intelligent"? What, in the end, can humans do that machines cannot?

I sat down with Kevin Kelly to get some answers, as he lays them out in his new book.

Kevin Kelly started as a photojournalist, in the US and in remote areas of Asia, before working as publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, from 1984 to 1990, which became the first consumer publication to report in significant ways on AI, VR, ecological restoration, the global teenager, and Internet culture. In 1993, he launched Wired magazine, where he was Executive Editor and is now "Senior Maverick." Under him, it won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence (the Oscars of the industry) twice. He has since written multiple books and has been involved with a variety of long-term, deep-thinking technological projects. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future is available in bookstores and on Amazon in June.

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Just this week, Elon Musk's SpaceX, in a series of tweets, announced its plan to reach Mars in unmanned missions by 2018. While NASA has announced its own plan for landing humans there by 2030, Musk is not alone among private entrepreneurs - Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson included — aggressively advocating for more R&D into space exploration. And these innovators are not just thinking about exploration, but serious colonization. In Musk's words: "It's a fundamental decision we have to make as a civilization. Mars is the next, natural step. In fact, it's the only planet we really have a shot at establishing a self-sustaining city on."

Sounds like the stuff of science fiction is on its way to becoming science fact. To get our heads around these developments and what the next steps in space exploration could look like, I spoke with Allen Steele, an award winning writer whose most recent book, Arkwright, was published in March. Arkwright, all too timely given Musk's high-profile announcement, follows the fictional Arkwright Foundation through multiple generations, from its founding by wealthy science fiction writer Nathan Arkwright, as the foundation builds a human colony beyond Earth.

As one review noted, "Science fiction can't really predict the future, but it can position itself to preempt it: it can inspire a direction that we can take." So what could be the future of humanity, on or beyond Earth?

Allen Steele has been writing science fiction since 1988, and is the winner of three Hugo Awards. Before starting his career as a novelist, he had worked as a journalist. He has served on the Board of Advisors for the Space Frontier Foundation, and on the Board of Directors of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In April 2001, he testified before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of on space exploration in the 21st century. Steele's almost innumerable essays, novellas, novels, and other works are available in twelve languages.

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Trade and trade partnerships hit the American public in a big way this past summer in the form of the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, with voices on right and left chiming in on a deal positioned as President Obama's NAFTA. Signed this past February by twelve nations representing 40% of the world economy, it produced a wide variety of opinions even within my home base at the American Enterprise Institute.

But China - one half of the world's two economic superpowers — wasn't part of the TPP, and Donald Trump's campaign trail emphasis on failed American deal-making seems to stoke popular fears that trade with that country hurts the American worker. So did "trade [make[ America great," as one CEO opined in the WSJ? "Are Trade Agreements Good for Americans"? Is America losing a trade war that will see China crowned the world's strongest economy?

Here to simplify for us is Claude Barfield, Resident Scholar in international trade policy, science, and technology at the American Enterprise Institute. Before coming to AEI, he was on the faculties of Yale and the University of Munich, and worked at the National Journal; in the Department of Housing and Urban Development; the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and as a consultant to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. He is the author of Swap: How Trade Works and Telecoms and the Huawei conundrum: Chinese foreign direct investment in the United States, among other publications. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University.

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