“What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World,” a new book by the artist and design researcher Sara Hendren, opens with a challenge. A curator named Amanda has come to Hendren’s classroom at the Olin College of Engineering, where the author teaches courses on technology and disability.

In the awful, wearying months in which Harvey Weinstein’s ritualistic mistreatment of women was being recounted daily in the media, I found myself, like so many others, wondering and talking about the men in my life: ex-boyfriends, ex-stalkers, ex-harassers, ex-gropers.

The inequality of badly-run or corrupt states is boosted by the power of technology – but it’s also easier than ever to destabilise these states, thanks to technology. The question is: which future will prevail?

Silicon Valley’s sunny outlook on technology and opportunity ignores systematic inequalities. Just over a century ago, an electric company in Minnesota took out a full-page newspaper advertisement and listed 1,000 uses for electricity.

Are we entering a new planetary era? A working group of scientists met in Berlin last week to start answering this Earth-shifting question.

Is it really true that the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet?

When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago. Of course, the internet is great – I can now google and find the exact location of this restaurant on the edge of Liverpool or whatever. But when you look at the impact of this on the economy, it's mainly in the area of leisure.

The internet may have significantly changed the working patterns of people like you and me, but we are in a tiny minority. For most people, its effect is more about keeping in touch with friends and looking up things here and there. Economists have found very little evidence that since the internet revolution productivity has grown.

We are all here to speak about the virtue of masters. I wrote a work called The Ignorant Master. Therefore it falls to me to defend on this subject the most apparently unreasonable of positions: the first virtue of the master is that of ignorance. My book tells the history of a professor, Joseph Jacoto, who created a scandal in the Holland and France of the 1830s by proclaiming that uneducated people could learn on their own without a master to explain things to them, and that masters, on their side, could teach the things they themselves did not know. To the suspicion of trading in facile paradoxes we thus add that of being content with the cliches and extravagances of the history of pedagogy.

I would like however to show that what we are dealing with here is not the pleasure of paradox but a fundamental examination of the meaning of knowing, teaching and learning; that this is not merely an amusing journey into the history of pedagogy but a philosophical reflection, entirely up-to-d