The Oh, Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood.

Two guests today simultaneously and not in sequence.

Nick Cernick and Alex Williams co-authors of inventing the future, post-capitalism, and a world without work.

The book was first published by Verso in 2015 and then reissued in an updated expanded edition

last October.

The broad topic of the book is contained in its title.

It is a critique of the timidity of so much left politics today

and an argument for a future in which machines do more of our work

and humans do less.

An important part of it is its advocacy of a universal basic income, UBI, an idea with a long

history that has recently gained adherence and critics across the political spectrum.

It refers to the provision by the state of a basic monetary grant to all citizens,

which runs into the problems of citizenship, as we'll hear later, regardless of their work status.

We'll have more on the UBI and future shows.

Now Nick Cernac, he's the one with a Canadian accent,

and Alex Williams with the English accent.

The book opens with a critique of folk politics

which I found very invigorating although you seem to step back a bit from it in

your afterward. What is folk politics and why should we be concerned about it?

I think another name for folk politics might have been a politics of immediacy and partly

our argument was against the sort of turn towards a lot of

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