In this extra episode to accompany our thinking machines series, David and Shannon talk about where we are with AI today and try to sort the reality from the hype, the science from the fiction. Are these machines anywhere near thinking like us? How can their failures of reasoning be exposed? Was Biden right to warn that managing AI will be the ultimate test of political leadership? And why does AI reflect what we were rather than what we might become?

To accompany our new series on the history of thinking about thinking machines, in this bonus episode David explores the meaning and legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). What does a horror story have to say about the romance of science? Are we meant to sympathise with creator or creature? And does this extraordinary novel have a moral for the age of AI?

David and Chris Clark continue their conversation to explore how the great powers stumbled into war in the summer of 1914. Could the Austrians have backed away from war? Could Russia, Germany or France have de-escalated the crisis? Why in the end did Britain feel obliged to join in? How might the disaster have been avoided?

David discusses Michel Houellebecq’s explosive political and intellectual satire Submission (2015). Published seven years before the French Presidential election of 2022 it imagines what might happen if that contest were won by the Muslim Brotherhood candidate. Does the book deserve its toxic reputation? Is it an attack on French politics, religion or academia (or all three)? And how can its miserable narrator be so insightful and so repulsive all at the same time?

David talks about Philip Roth’s counterfactual fictional masterpiece The Plot Against America (2004), which imagines an alternative America after the election in 1940 of the fascist-sympathising Charles Lindbergh as President. Is the book really a prophecy of politics in the age of Trump? Who are the true heroes and villains in this story? And what does the plight of the fictional Roth family in Newark, NJ, tell us about the shadow history of America?

Historian Robert Saunders, our guide to past UK general elections, talks about one of his favourite political fictions: George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, set around an election that took place after the passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832. Robert explains how Eliot captured the chaos and possibility of a new kind of politics and how a book set 200 years ago still speaks to our political imaginations today.