An audience photographs Donald Trump at his Presidential rally in Laconia, New Hampshire ©Michael Vadon, 16th July 2015

Read more on technology: Are only poets safe from robots?

Consider this—the ASCI Red supercomputer, developed by the US government in 1997, used a 333 megahertz processor. That meant that its central processor was capable of a frequency of 333 X 10⁶ hertz. By contrast, an Apple iPhone 5, such as you may have in your pocket, contains a processor with a frequency of 1.3 gigahertz—that is, 1.3 X 10⁹ hertz, or just over four times the processor speed.

Human progress is rocketing forward, lending our age a sense of great acceleration. Things happen faster now and this speeding-up of the spread of information has brought huge changes in cultural life, in commerce and also in science.

It has also coincided with a remarkable upsurge in political volatility. Consider the speed with which political views and events are transmitted by social media and the enormous speed with which political ideas—and politi…

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