The Ned Ludd Radio Hour

Are we losing what it means to be human? To experience the world around us? That's the thesis presented by the writer Christine Rosen in her book The Extinction of Experience , where she argues that the digital world is mediating our interactions with the real world, leading to a decline in our cognitive abilities. But does any of this really matter? And can we do anything to prevent the kids of t...

How will the world end? You can take your pick from many of the scary options: a deadly pandemic that sweeps the globe, nuclear armageddon that vaporises our cities, climate change that drowns us all in boiling seas. Or will it be that one day ChatGPT and Gemini rise up and turn us all into subordinate meat-puppets? However you look at it, the world has been on the brink many times. Tom Ough is th...

Would you date a chatbot? That might sound an unlikely proposition but new research suggests that 1 in 10 Gen Zers has engaged romantically with an AI companion. This looks like the next frontier in internet dating; one that could reshape how our society functions. Or is this just a case of a few weirdos on the web claiming to tabloid journalists that they're married to their iPhone? This week, we...

Last month, hundreds of anti-AI protestors took to the streets of London to protest the growing ubiquity of the technology. Is this the start of a Ludditesque movement or just a howl into the void? Alys Key – author of the UK 2.0 Substack – was on site, covering the protests for Transformer . In this episode of The Ned Ludd Radio Hour we discuss the protests in London and whether they're a case st...

Is the age of literacy – the primacy of the written word – ending? Put another way, are we entering a new world where frayed attention spans, technological enshittification and political polarisation drive people away from the intentional act of reading, and towards more instantly gratifying cultural forms? Like podcasts… To discuss all this, I'm joined by by the cultural critic James Marriott and...

Much of how we see the world is governed by a sense of fear. It’s what keeps me driving within the legal limits. Fear of a crash and fear of the reprisals for speeding. Since AI became a big cause celébrè, it has also been the catalyst for fears. There is the fear that AI might cause the extinction of the human species, and the fear that it might render me redundant. What if an AI model launches i...

When I started this podcast, I was feeling a bit gloomy about the way that technology was heading, but I wasn’t gripped by full-on panic.   Yet here we are, a year or so later, and I feel like I’ve been radicalised. Not a day goes by when there isn’t some announcement from Silicon Valley that would chill the blood of even the more rational of tech consumers. We are heading into the vortex. &n...

This week on the Ned Ludd Radio Hour a piece on 'subscription addiction' and spreadflation. Are consumers being screwed over by the rise and rise of different subscriptions to media and entertainment services? And are creators headed for an economic cliff edge? Listen – and then subscribe to my Substack , duh. Written and read by Nick Hilton. Music by Apes of the State. Cover artwork by Tom Humber...

A couple of weeks ago, Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old American, allegedly shot Brian Thompson, the CEO of a major health insurer in the US. Suddenly, a lot of the ideas I’d be gently noodling with on this show were being discussed as potential sources of violence. Was Mangione a Luddite? Someone who felt that technology had atomised a generation? Or was he, in fact, an accelerationist who believed...

Julio Vincent Gambuto is a New York based author and marketing professional. His new book is Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a Relentless World . As you’ll hear from our conversation, most of the ideas that Julio posits in the book are things that came to him during the covid-19 lockdown in 2020, when the intricate structures of the world where exp...

Here in the UK we have an estimated adult literacy rate of 99%, which the US is at 86%. Amongst UN member states, the average is 86.7%. Adult literacy has been one of the great triumphs of the 20th century, but it has also become a productive necessity as the service and information economies have grown. It is hard to conduct business without being able to read. And yet the pleasure of reading is...

it’s time to talk about Apple. Apple that big, sleek, glossy company with a current market cap of some $3.3 trillion dollars. The same Apple with whose products you are, quite plausibly, listening to this podcast. Indeed, they’re the reason a podcast is called a podcast: the cast is from broadcast, but the pod? That’s from the iPod. Remember those? Apple has long felt like one of those tech compan...

The impact that technology has on psychology is a new field of research, and one where the multi-decade studies required to give definitive answers are still many years away. One of the other fields being covered is the area of certainty. Is the internet making people to certain about the opinions? Too close-minded to the possibility that they might be wrong, or might have more to learn? And to wh...

Today, we're speaking to Kester Brewin , an author who works for the delightfully named Institute for the Future of Work here in London. He’s just about to release a new book called God-like: a 500 year history of Artificial Intelligence in myths, machines and monsters . It's a book which charts the ideas that underpin everything – from ChatGPT and Dall. E to the recently-released Sora – back to t...

'Enshittification' is a word coined by the Canadian writer and technologist Cory Doctorow to describe, to filch Wikipedia’s definition, “the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that function as two-sided markets”. This is the tension behind much of Big Tech. How do businesses extract value without destroying the identity that they built, and, as a result, alienating their userbase? D...

I don’t want to be too pearl clutching in all this, but there are some kids who never touch grass, figuratively or literally. I see these groups of teenagers in London who seem to be chatting but seem also to have their headphones in, like they’re living some strange hybrid life. How long is it before the ability to function, in a society that has long prizes independence, is irreparably eroded? T...

Look, let’s get real: if you’re a bricklayer or a pilot or a veterinary nurse or a paediatric orthodontist or the pest control guy who delicately places pieces of cheese in mouse traps, there hasn’t been a work from home revolution. The revolution, in so much as there has been one, has been in the information services sector, an area that probably over-hired, over-invested in real estate, and was...

This is an atypical episode of The Ned Ludd Radio Hour to kick things off in 2024. Rather than an interview, or a missive from Ned, this is just an audio version of a blog called 'The Hedge Bet on Humanity'. Do listen and enjoy; next week we'll be back with more interviews with top technological thinkers! Written and presented by Nick Hilton. Artwork by Tom Humberstone. Music by Apes of the State....

My guest for today’s discussion, which looks back on 2023, which has been labelled by some (including everyone’s favourite Substacker Matt Yglesias) as the media’s “annus horribilis” is Ian Silvera . Ian is a former political journalist here in the UK but has now crossed the divide to work for a fancy PR agency. This makes him well-placed to discuss the trends that are buffeting the industry, but...

Jathan Sadowski, my guest today, is an academic and our conversation is going to sound a bit academic. He’s a senior fellow at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University in Melbourne. He has also authored a book called, worryingly, Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World and co-hosts a, much more successful, weekly pod...

My guest today made a chicken sandwich. It took him 6 months and cost him $1500. Now, this wouldn’t usually be cause for inviting someone onto a podcast to talk about globalisation, but Andy George is no ordinary maker of chicken sandwiches. He runs a YouTube channel called How To Make Everything, which, at time of writing, has 1.74m subscribers. Andy’s premise is simple, he makes everything but h...

This morning, upon waking – it’s currently 7:50am as I type, but not as I read – I lay in bed for the first half hour and scrolled through Instagram Reels. This isn’t something I do very often but it’s a pursuit that people around me – ahem – do quite a lot of. To be honest, I still predominantly use Instagram in the old school way, scrolling through my home screen of people’s grid posts, or watch...

Today, I want to talk about Wikipedia – not because I think it’s under any real threat from Elon Musk or other external forces. Instead, I want to talk about it because I think it’s something of subtly profound importance in the internet age. In a moment you’ll hear me speaking to Alex Hollender who was a staff member at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs the show, who led the 2023...

I’m a smartphone addict . I admit it. I’ve just checked my screentime on my Apple iPhone SE and it’s 1 hour and 28 minutes per day on average, a figure that should be shocking except that I know, from those around me, that it’s not very much by modern standards. I won’t name names but I know people who have 6, 7, 8 hours of screen time per day. This is the point at which the phone becomes another...

This is The Ned Ludd Radio Hour – your weekly dose of tech scepticism, cynicism and absurdism. Hosted by me, Nick Hilton. This is a podcast for people who love tech and people who hate it (just not for those who don't care). Each week the new Ned Ludd sends me a missive (republished below) and then I speak to a top bod (or two) about issues that I think are interesting. This week I'm speaking to G...