This concerns people and power. We're faced with a big question: how to balance effective governance with popular participation. Every kind of system needs to embrace everyone unless we want a world where some thrive and others suffer - the world is crowded, interdependent and networked, everything is affected by everything else and we live in a time of amplifying consequences.

This is an age of throngs. Occasionally people mass in the streets or online, swaying unpredictably between the wisdom of the majority and the madness of crowds. A kind of democratisation and dispersal of power is re-shaping political process, causing authoritarian regimes to become more responsive to their publics and democracies to become more confused by them. This bypasses conventional party, class, local and sectoral loyalties, articulating emergent public instincts, hopes, issues or grievances more than it shapes coherent ideologies.

This podcast covers power in society, governance, oligarchies, socio-political change, gender politics and artificial intelligence - big issues in our time. It's taken from a report I wrote in 2017 about the future of the world, at Possibilities2050.org. It is a comprehensive and readable report spanning all major issues and risks facing the world today. This podcast is a reading of the chapter on politics and power. It might help sort out your perspective on things.

Best wishes, Palden

palden.co.uk