This year’s Bristol Radical History Festival focused on the persistent threats of racism, xenophobia and, of course, our radical collective resistance to it across Ireland and Britain, reports LYNNE WALSH

ROBOTS are here. They run our lives, they do our jobs, they find our soulmates, they persuade us what to listen to, how to spend our time and money, they teach us, they connect us to other people.
Your phone is a robot, your checkout is a robot, your smart speaker is a robot, your computer is a robot, your electronics are robots, using the internet means using robots to use other robots.
Perhaps calling all of these technologies “robots” is unnecessarily simplifying. It’s not how we imagined the future of machinery when the first automatons of the industrial revolution tumbled clanking and steaming into factories, or how robots were imagined in most visions of the future in sci-fi comics and films. And yet this is what we have made.

A maverick’s self-inflicted snake bites could unlock breakthrough treatments – but they also reveal deeper tensions between noble scientific curiosity and cold corporate callousness, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Science has always been mixed up with money and power, but as a decorative facade for megayachts, it risks leaving reality behind altogether, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT

