"We don't really have a pro with the idea of slavery. We just have a problem with people like us being enslaved," he says. "The historical pessimist would come back with, yes, doesn't seem to mean that much when you look at how many new peoples are going to be enslaved and how this is going to be turned into a machine." 'I'm not a historian, and it's difficult to try to take the various strands in this story and rank them in a tree oge type of level of importance'