Anders Lustgarten, Ray Kurzweil, the Anglosphere

With Rana Mitter.

Playwright Anders Lustgarten discusses his new play, 'If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep', which explores how the privatization of crime could have disastrous consequences.

Renowned American inventor, thinker and futurist Ray Kurzweil tells Rana how recent progresses in Artificial Intelligence mean we are getting ever closer to being able to reverse engineer the brain; and discusses questions of consciousness and humanity, and the radical possibilities of a world where humans and intelligent machines live side by side.

And is Britain's relationships with her former dominions just a matter of language and cricket, or is there a distinct cultural, political and economic outlook that's shared across the English-speaking world? If so, what should that mean for the UK as it negotiates its relationship with Europe, and with the non-English speaking parts of the former British Empire? Rana discusses the idea of the Anglosphere with the historians John Darwin and Tim Stanley and the writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.