At a Labour party conference-adjacent event in September, The World Transformed, Jeremy Corbyn was pictured waving an arm in front of an arcade cabinet bearing the words Thatcher's Techbase. The game – a modified version of 1994's famous infernal shooter, Doom II – sees players hunting down a resurrected, cyborg version of the former prime minister in a labyrinthine fortress. The images kicked off a minor media storm. "Pictured: Jeremy Corbyn plays video game that lets players kill Margaret Thatcher," said The Telegraph; the photos were featured in the Daily Mail, the Express and the Times. They even appeared on Have I Got News for You. Jim Purvis, the game's creator – who took and later tweeted the photos – was somewhat surprised.

Nothing is as remote as yesterday's utopias. From the 1990s until the end of the last decade, the explosion in computing power was seen by wide-eyed optimists as a force for liberation that would lay low unaccountable authority. Their eyes have narrowed now. Democracy, justice, our very ability to earn a living, feel precarious. "All that is solid melts into air," said Marx of 19th-century capitalism.

Phil and Stephen Gordon discuss rapid progress in artificial intelligence and how AI is fundamentally reshaping our world.