‘There is no inevitable dystopia’: Jeanette Winterson on AI and the future of humanity

The author believes we are at a turning point as a species – and even in the shadow of big tech it’s up to us how we want to proceed ‘I am a storyteller by trade,” writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes , an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking serie

The author believes we are at a turning point as a species – and even in the shadow of big tech it’s up to us how we want to proceed ‘I am a storyteller by trade,” writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes , an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking series of essays in which she considered just how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. “And I know everything we do is a fiction until it’s a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying – or of returning.” She had already been thinking about our possible futures for at least 15 years – her 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, for instance, imagined a post-climate catastrophe world populated by robots and humans who never age, while 12 Bytes was preceded by Frankisstein: A Love Story , which alternates a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor’s travels among present-day cryogenecists and AI-enabled robots. Continue reading...