12 Bytes: How AI Will Change the Way We Live and Love

by Jeanette Winterson

The Book of J (1990), where Bloom looks at the earliest texts that were later redacted and varnished to become the Hebrew Bible. The first 5 books, the Pentateuch, were written around 10 centuries before the birth of the man Jesus – so they are separated from us by around 3,000 years. Bloom thinks that the author of those early texts was a woman, and Bloom was certainly no feminist. His arguments are persuasive and it delights me that the most famous character in Western literature – God, the Author of All – was himself authored by a woman.

I wanted to know why so few women seem to be interested in computing science. Was it always the case?

Both Mary and Ada intuited that the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution would lead to more than the development and application of machine technology. They recognised a decisive shift in the fundamental framing of what it means to be human. Victor Frankenstein: ‘If I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter …’ Ada: ‘An explicit function … worked out by the engine … without having been worked out by human heads and human hands first.’

One of Ada’s maths tutors, Augustus De Morgan, was worried that too much maths might break Ada’s delicate constitution. At the same time, he believed her to be more gifted and able than any pupil (read boys) he had taught, and said in a letter to her mother that Ada could become ‘an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence’. Poor Ada. Told to study maths to avoid going poetically mad. Then told she was at risk of going mathematically mad.

Strangely, not strangely(?), Brontë Zone and Ada Zone mansplaining is still alive and well on the web. More accurately, and more importantly, there is now Ada Lovelace Day, celebrated on the second Tuesday of October. In the UK we have the Ada Lovelace Institute (founded 2018), an independent body whose mission is to ensure that data use and AI technology work for the benefit of society as a whole – and not for the self-entitled few.

As a female mathematician, Ada stands as a beacon for women in maths and computing. Women need a beacon, because external and internal prejudices are still running full throttle. Right now, in the first quarter of the 21st century, only about 20% of the people working in electrical engineering, computer programming and machine learning are female.

The six women who programmed one of the world’s first viable programmable computers – the ENIAC – were not invited to its launch at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, nor were they mentioned in the celebrations.

Gender is still the roadblock in the way. That includes the way we manage gender in the workplace. Is an all-male tech-room a comfortable place for a woman to be? Do women routinely see other women working in tech? We copy what we can see – and a truly mixed workplace is empowering to women without anyone needing to make a big deal out of it.

Ada wasn’t free to go out and build the world. She was the legal property first of her father, and then of her husband. When she married at 19, she spent the next 3 years having 3 children. Babbage’s wife did that job for him.

And if you read half the "self-made" millionaires and the productivity gurus who happen to be dads, you'll see this is still a prominent difference, even if the dads themselves don't acknowledge it, the absence of talking about childcare is a stark contrast to how the mums talk about it in their books.

It all starts with a ground-breaking paper Ada wrote – without actually realising she had written it, because back in the day women didn’t write scientific papers.

Computing uses symbolic logic – a development on basic algebra that was a new discovery in Ada’s day. Ada’s maths teacher, Augustus De Morgan, was a pioneer in the field, corresponding with the self-taught mathematician George Boole (1815–1864). It is fair to say that there isn’t a piece of technology on the planet that is operating right this second without using Boolean logic. It’s the basis of computing. And it’s down to True or False.

Another unlikely alignment in Ada's life. But the simple fact is that amongst all these men whose names are immortalised in the fundamental laws of computer science, the person who connected the dots, and saw the future, has no reference in the fundamentals of computing, because why would any man credit a woman with genius?

To be a spinster was a proper job title with cash and kudos attached. A spinster wasn’t a past-it woman who had ‘failed’ to find a man, she was a valued member of the community, who could, if she wished, support herself independently.

A spinster, like a computer, was a well paid and respected job, primarily performed by women, that was automated out of existence. I'm starting to see a pattern.

The Industrial Revolution was a practical revolution. Humans reworked everything we had learned over millennia of trial and error – clothing, manufacture, transport, heating, lighting, weaponry, medicine, construction. Faster. Cheaper. More of it.

By 1860 Britain was still the only fully industrialised economy in the world, producing HALF of the world’s iron and textiles (just dwell on that for a second).

Manchester, where I was born, soon became the cotton capital of the world, and until World War One, 65% of the world’s cotton was processed in Manchester, aka Cottonopolis. America supplied most of that raw cotton. Britain’s relationship with its former colony was crucial. Millions of acres and hundreds of thousands of slaves grew cotton. In 1790 the southern state plantations had been exporting around 3,000 bales. By 1860 they were exporting 4.5 million bales.

There's a lot of history hidden behind that statement. And not just the stories if those who planted and harvested the cotton.

The Industrial Revolution is a tipping point in environmental history. It’s when fossil fuels come out of the ground in world-changing quantities. Britain had a lot of coal and used it to gain an early advantage.

Friedrich Engels watched the money and the misery pile up in equal measure, though by no means equally distributed. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England. A horde of ragged women and children, as filthy as the swine that thrives upon the garbage heaps and puddles – neither drains nor pavements – standing pools in all directions – the dark smoke of factory chimneys. A measureless filth and stench.

The new machinery in the factories had increased output by 25% per person (don’t fly over that statistic – consider its implications). Wages, though, had scarcely risen by 5% from their pre-industrial levels. And now people were out of the countryside, with its free food and fuel economy, and living in the burgeoning cities – where everything had to be paid for with money. Conditions were foul. No running water. No sanitation. Pigsty dwellings. Filthy air. Life expectancy was around 30 years for the slum-housed factory workers. So much money. So little equality. Folks called Manchester the Golden Sewer.

The word Luddite still means an old-fashioned type who is anti-progress. But the Luddites of the early 19th century were not against progress; they were against exploitation. The 1812 Frame-Breaking Act made damage to a power loom punishable by death. Luddites were risking their lives, not to return to some sentimental rural Arcadia, but to earn enough to feed their children.

Only in 1832 were children under 9 years old barred from factory work. Only then were children of 10 years and older limited to a 48-hour working week. Shall I write that again? A 48-hour working week for 10-year olds.

Thomas Paine, an American living in England, published The Rights of Man (1791). Paine’s book identifies and explores what we think of as a modern concept – and one that is now under threat: the idea of ‘civil rights’. Paine says that people should be able to expect security – of their persons, and of what they own or have access to (like common land), of jobs (job security) and of wages. Tax should be progressive – the rich pay more than the poor. Education should be available and subsidised. There should be universal old-age pensions. Maternity pay. Funded apprenticeships to aid young people.

Whenever a woman took on a job previously done by a man, the job itself was downgraded. What looks like male chauvinism in the Industrial Revolution, as working men refused to train women to work the machines, was really a fight for survival. A man knew that if his wife or his sister was able to do his job, then he would be paid less. And in lean times only one of them would be offered work. Not him.

In 1801 a General Enclosure Act made land-grab easier for the grabbers and much harder for anyone else – even modestly prosperous small farmers – to do anything about. Compensation was paid to some people, but money is soon spent, whereas land remains. Enclosure of common land, or peppercorn-rented land, left nowhere for the cottager or terraced-house dweller to keep a few sheep or a cow, or to grow extra crops beyond the garden. Wood could not be gathered freely to heat the home, or for cooking. What had been held in common for all became private property.

Enclosure had a catastrophic effect on the individual and local economy – often balanced on an informal system of exchange. This literal lack of land, and the extras it provided in terms of food and fuel, drove many more people through the dirty doors of the factory system than would have happened otherwise

The tragedy of the commons is that it was lost to private ownership, turning everyone from feudal serf to spender.

Marx was right: the old loyalties, the old traditions, and any sense of paternalism had been destroyed by the brutality and betrayals of the twin hits of enclosure and industrialisation. It was nearly a knock-out blow.

In 1862 at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Lancashire cotton workers voted against supporting the American south and its slave interests and resolved to support the north and Abolition. The workers knew this would involve considerable hardship (and they knew what considerable hardship involved). Yet by now globalisation meant something more than free trade; it was the beginning of the Information Age.

The legal end of slavery, imperfect and unfinished as it was, is such an important moral milestone. The legal end of slavery marked the end of any claim to the ‘natural’ right of one person to own another. This went straight to the heart of the woman question. All women, whatever colour, whatever class, were the legal property of their nearest male relative. Widows had some autonomy.

In the factories, and in the vast, expanding towns and cities, large groups of women were meeting one another in workplaces, and on the streets, in a way that was wholly new, both in scale and dailiness. Men have always met outside of the home. For women, the factory experience, brutal though it was, brought them together beyond anything that family, village, farm, church, or domestic service had made possible.

Yes, parkland was the 19th-century way of saying – Oops, we did steal all the common land during Enclosure, but never mind, here is some grass and a fountain, etc (and often a few statues of ‘great’ men), all provided, without charge, for the mental health and moral uplift of the working class.

Working class. As the great historian of labour E. P. Thompson put it, ‘Class is a relationship. Not a thing.’ That is, class is mistaken for a noun, like horse, or house, but class doesn’t exist in its own right. It isn’t a thing. And it isn’t a natural phenomenon – like gravity. In an equal society, class would not exist. Social division is relational – it isn’t a pre-existing condition.

Capitalism is Darwinian in the true sense; not the cheap line about ‘survival of the fittest’, but the ability to adapt to different and surprising circumstances – and stay the course.

As I write this, in 2021, the coronavirus has shut down the world economy. We have never seen anything like this before. The only way of saving Western economies has been socialism on the dream-scale. The state is paying our wages, backing business loans, guaranteeing jobs.

Amazon money is made out of a percentage of everything sold on the site. You could say that’s what all storekeepers do – and they do – but the store is also a physical and local part of the community where it sits. And the storekeeper pays individual and corporate taxes that in turn help to educate the workforce, keep the roads in good order, contribute towards hospitals, etc.

And it’s not just Amazon. Google and Facebook employ only a few of us – only 1% of Facebook revenue is spent on wages – but they make money from all of us. This isn’t wealth creation; it is wealth extraction. Just as it is when Uber takes a slice of the money for a cab ride, or when Airbnb gets you to monetise your own bed.

Maybe you make some money by renting out your bed. But maybe your friend is fired from the hotel because it loses business. Or wages are kept low because hotel-room rates must be kept low, because of competition from Airbnb. At the same time it gets harder to rent an affordable place to live. And those who live close by regularly let Airbnb ‘homes’. Do we love it? No, we hate it. The ‘sharing’ economy (sharing is not a financial transaction – do words mean nothing?) does not factor social consequences into its business model. The consequences for other people, for thriving cities where people can afford to live, the consequences of endless pointless travel, the toll on the planet, are irrelevant.

Marx, finding his way around the Industrial Revolution, urged workers to take control of the means of production. But what happens when human beings are the means of production? Or, more correctly, the means of extraction?

Imagine if the Industrial Revolution had been run as a collective effort between all of the people and all of the planet. No slavery, no child labour, no exploitation, no enclosure, no despoiling the earth. And before you say that could never happen, and the proof is that it didn’t happen – yes, I know, but, as I said right at the start of this essay, the past is what we learn from. How we manage the next revolution doesn’t have to be a societal nightmare with benefits eventually trickling down from the few to the many.

AI in its multiple manifestations – including automation and robotics – including smart homes and ambient computing – is the technology humans need for the next stage of our development. There’s no need to be afraid of the technology – it’s how we use it that matters. The invention of the power loom didn’t have to create a hateful factory system and slum cities – it could have freed men and women from long hours of work. Instead, working hours increased.

The more I read, the more I realise that the tech companies are, at present, outmanoeuvring their social and fiscal responsibilities to the billions of people who are micro-dosing them with money 24/7.

Uber and Airbnb are just the same. If that’s the model business favours, then the only option is legislation. This won’t strangle innovation, as the tech-bullies claim. (Bullies love to play the victim.) Legislation will put a choke on innovation strangling us.

Your web – where everything is tailored to ‘help’ you navigate faster, get to what you want, often via what you might be persuaded to want – is the new consumer model where the customer pays twice – with cash for the goods, and with the free gift of information about ourselves.

Access to different ideas and a wider world view just disappears. It’s censored. Not by a censor, of course, because that would be totalitarian – but by what looks like personal choice, your very own personal choices, nudged a little, just for you.

A great description of the dangers of the filter bubble

Most of life is about being wrong, making mistakes, changing our minds. Web profiling means you need never be wrong, never seem to make a mistake, never have to change your mind. You’ll be sold what you have already bought. You will read what you have already read. Amplified. × 100.

A mini-me PA will be a seductive choice. Why wouldn’t we want an able, considerate, smart helper who is always available, and mostly free? That used to be called a wife. But then feminism spoiled the party.

Driverless cars are a lovely idea – we can go to the pub, act like we’ve got our own chauffeur, work in the back seat. There’s no cab driver giving us his worldview of American politics, just peace and quiet, and our own private pod. But what happens when you realise that this lovely private pod isn’t private at all? Driverless cars track your movements. Random becomes predictable becomes dossier. The pods can be redirected. Police station? Your scary ex’s home? Enforced trip to hospital as your implant registers your blood-pressure risk? Hijacked? Kidnapped? Autonomous isn’t anonymous.

Anyway, all those self-help books and apps suggest strong incentives to turn ourselves into someone else. Someone happier, more efficient, better … what the internet of things promises to deliver. And in many cases will deliver.

Anti-individual behavioural theory came into vogue with the American Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner after World War Two. Back then it was straightforward Behaviorism. Now it’s Radical Behaviorism, and there are plenty of psychologists helping companies and political groups with their moral reasoning here. Steve Bannon in the USA and Dominic Cummings in the UK are disciples of the new-style Skinnerism that seeks to manipulate ‘individual’ behaviour.

Modern medicine has already reset human biology. We live twice as long as our ancestors at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

This is a common fallacy. Average life expectancy has increased because children are more likely to survive into adulthood (thanks vaccines). Human longevity has barely moved in comparison.

why is privacy problematic in our internet-of-everything future? Privacy is friction.

Ironically, although the world may become much poorer because of Covid-19, the virus is a chance for the tech giants to get much richer, and to get more control. And not just Amazon doing home delivery.