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

by Jeanette Winterson

Optimists say that the energy requirements of an AI future will force the world towards low-carbon solutions. The market will drive the change because it must.

Quantum computers must be absolutely remote from any entanglement with reality – entanglement affects the outcome, as anyone who has ever fallen in love knows.

So, it was only a matter of time – when, not if – before machines could manage themselves, without humans doing the programming. The problems Minsky and his associates encountered were problems with computing power and speed – not with the theory of autonomous neural networks.

It's no coincidence that AI accelerated after cloud computing

Minsky credited his own enthusiasm for developing an AI system that can think for itself to Turing’s 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Read it now, and to me the most interesting part of a fascinating paper that includes telepathy and hive-mind networking is what Turing called Lady Lovelace’s Objection – replying directly to the dead genius who 100 years earlier had concluded that Babbage’s Analytical Engine, while being theoretically able to write novels and compose music (a big insight in 1843!) would not be capable of originating anything.

Turing got the point. Most of his colleagues agreed with Ada, without acknowledging it was Ada they were agreeing with, because Turing was the first scientist since her death to take her seriously in her own right – rather than as a footnote to Babbage.

Unsurprising to me that a man who was surrounded by smart, analytical women at Bletchley Park would respect the same when he read the work of Lovelace.

What Turing wanted to do with his body – have sex with men – seemed to be more important to petty, post-war Britain than what he could do with his mind.

I get what she's saying but I'm surprised to hear her relegate sexuality to a purely physical thing.

So, what did the Gnostics believe, and why is it relevant to the coming world of artificial intelligence? For a Gnostic, the world is not a once-upon-a-time perfect place in need of redemption. There is no Golden Age. No Good Old Days. No Paradise. No Fall. Our world was created badly from the start – not out of evil, but out of ignorance. The story goes that somewhere in the universe is the Pleroma, the place (but it isn’t a place – it’s a concept) of fullness and light.

Humans, therefore, are not sinful. Humans are ignorant. Discovering who we are and where we belong is our task.

All of those fairy tales where the princess is locked away and needs to be rescued come from this source – as do those stories of going to seek your other half, like Orpheus and Eurydice, or the mission of righting a wrong, like St George and the Dragon. It has all got tangled up with boring binaries of male and female – active and passive – but once you remember that Sophia isn’t part of a binary, but is an equal and active qubit, it makes sense. Gnostics agreed that being made of meat is ridiculous.

most Gnostics treated women as equals and did not seek power structures. Both of those positions drove Bishop Irenaeus mad – and were evidence to the orthodox of the madness of the Gnostics

The Gnostics followed the practical Jewish tradition of the importance of living a responsible and charitable life here on earth – and they welded on Greek ideas of the importance of the self-aware, fully conscious life.

There’s a new kind of quasi-religious discourse forming, with its own followers, its creed, its orthodoxy, its heretics, its priests, its literature, its eschatological framework. Even its own Singularity. It’s AI.

Not for nothing is the coming glory of AI often called the Rapture of the Geeks. Or Nerds. The Rapture, for Christians, is when Jesus returns, and the Saved get swept up to eternal life. Those of us brought up in religious homes are fascinated and horrified in equal measure by the similarities between AI enthusiasts and ole-time religion.

The apostles of the AI future are eager to greet the end of the biological body (Ray Kurzweil, Max More), and an end to living on Planet Earth (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel). This has been criticised as the typical male Freedom Fantasy. A world without physical responsibilities where we leave our mess behind us. But really, it is just a version of Heaven

This is ancient knowledge and new knowledge. It is liberating. There is no fundamental building block of matter. No core. No floor. There is nothing solid. There are no binaries. There is energy, change, movement, interplay, connection, relationship. It’s a white supremacist’s nightmare.

The change of theory from organism to machine was drastic. It has had a profound effect on our view of the natural world. And although all the science now tells us that nature is not a machine, and that living systems cannot be reduced to their parts, but only fully understood via their connections, our everyday reductionist mindset is finding it hard to ditch 300 years of what we were told were scientific and philosophical certainties.

That is dangerous. Women struggle enough with no means no. If no never means no, or if no is not a real word at all, how does this enable men and women to dance the difficult territory that is the sexual encounter, that is mutual consent, and then work together to build a viable sexual relationship? You can buy a doll with what the makers call a ‘frigid’ button – so that she will resist, and her owner can simulate rape. Go on any of the websites, and you’ll be directed to your preference. ‘Do what you’d never dare to do with a live woman

Or as they put it on the TV show Humans "what they do to us, they would do to you if they got the chance"

As Laura Bates has described in her frightening book Men Who Hate Women (2020), the manosphere out there isn’t just a few throwback guys grumbling about the girls. The manosphere is easily reached via routine porn sites – the sites a lot of young boys visit. Soon boys can be ‘chatting’ to men who will tell them how the world is – by all accounts stacked against them with lying, vindictive, out-of-control females.

In the Old Testament, Yahweh appears as a cloud. As the cloud stores all our data, it is reasonable to assume that the Israelites were ahead of themselves with this particular image of the AllKnowing.

Maybe We're all just stuck in a loop

AI could be a portal into a value-free gender and race experience. One where women and men are not subject to assumptions and stereotypes based on their biological sex, and accident of birthplace. AI isn’t that door to freedom because AI is trained on data-sets. What’s in the data-set is what the AI learns. The open door closes pretty fast.

Diversity is problematic if it isn’t included in the data-sets to start with. If it isn’t included, then the echo-chamber effect of AI, where algorithms using data-sets as their parameters to sort through and assign yet more data, makes the initial errors and gaps much worse.

I see all types of homophobia, or sexual-identity discrimination, as gender discrimination. It comes back to ideas about what a man ‘should’ be. What a woman ‘is’.

Trans people just now are bearing the brunt of our confusion around identity. Biology is not identity. Sexuality is not identity. I feel like trans folks are the canaries in the coal-mine, alerting us to different modes of self-definition.

In France, the Revolution of 1789 declared freedom from inherited privilege. Not what you were born with – but what you could become. Liberty. Fraternity. Equality. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her ground-breaking polemic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), fought with the French Republic founding philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau over his irrational refusal to accept that women were also creatures of Nurture, shaped, or rather misshaped, by their upbringings as lesser beings, and denied an education – indeed, denied any rights at all. Women, said Wollstonecraft, were not born frivolous; they were made frivolous, and had frivolity thrust upon them.

James Watson, part of the team who discovered the double helix, and who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for doing so, stated in 2007 that African races were not as intelligent as white races. ‘There’s a difference between Blacks and whites on IQ tests. I would say the difference is genetic.’ Watson also had this to say about women: ‘People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.’ ‘We’, I suppose, means men. But this is the man who repeatedly under-represented the work of Rosalind Franklin, the genius crystallographer whose famous Photo 51 determined the defraction pattern of the double helix. It seems to have bothered Watson, according to his autobiography, that she didn’t wear make-up or care about her clothes.

As an aside here, while Cambridge was slowly pondering the woman question – far harder for the all-male Board to solve than anything on the Mathematics Tripos, the University did award Bachelor degrees, by title, to women, rather than full honours degrees. Between 1921 and 1948 the men awarding these semi-degrees called them BA tit. (Thanks, guys.)

Women like Philippa Fawcett were seen as flukes. Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, was seen as a fluke.

Stuart Reges, who works at the Paul G. Allen School of Computing Science at Washington State University, agreed with Damore. By all accounts an excellent teacher, Reges opted for the line that there is no extrinsic reason why females wouldn’t take up computer science if they wanted to do so – in other words, he can’t see the patriarchy because he is part of it. His views, and others like them, have also been championed by that fighter for female equality, Jordan Peterson.

When men such as these face the inevitable criticism, they re-cast themselves as free-speech warriors fighting virtue politics, even being forced into the closet. They talk about witch hunts. About discrimination. They become the victims.

After the war, women in the UK and USA were needed for the technical skills they had acquired – but because they were women, their job descriptions were downgraded to make it look like clerical work. In Britain, those women involved in computer work for the government were classed as ‘machine-grade operators’. They were barred from management positions (barred!), and paid around half (half!) the amount of the men they subsequently trained to be ‘computer engineers’.

Stephanie was continually refused promotion – even though she studied at night school for 6 years and obtained a maths degree. In her autobiography Let It Go, she says she was sick of the sexism and the sexual harassment. She left, and founded her own company, Freelance Programmers – offering programming services to the UK Government and to large firms. Stephanie’s secret was to call herself Steve. As Stephanie, her letters were unanswered. As Steve, she got the contracts she needed. Her secret weapon was her workforce: she only hired women. Women like herself who had been passed over for promotions, fired, let go on marriage or on becoming pregnant (all perfectly legal in 1960s Britain). Her company employed more than 300 housewife programmers, all working from home, some of whom programmed the black-box software for Concorde (in their living rooms).

According to Margolis, skewing computer use towards boys meant that male students began to arrive on computing courses already knowing the basics of programming after spending hours playing games on their home computer. Girls arrived eager and ready to learn but found themselves at an immediate disadvantage. Instead of being helped, they were often mocked – as if boys had some natural ability, as evidenced by their knowledge, whereas girls just didn’t have the right kind of brain. And no one was showing the girls pictures of the ENIAC and its all-female team, nor were professors goading the boys to see if any of them could manage what the women had done – without a manual.

popular bible with what it takes to be a computer-head. Men invented the geek-gene – and then worshipped it as God-given. As Simone de Beauvoir put it: ‘Men describe [the world] from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth’ (The Second Sex).

In India things have progressed differently – which in itself questions the men do/women don’t argument. The tech gender gap is far less apparent in India, where women enthusiastically take coding courses and degrees in computer science. India is hardly a feminist utopia, but women have been encouraged to take up programming work because it is seen as something a woman can do at home, and that can be fitted in around childcare.

School is a problem. In a school environment, children and young people are impressionable. Stereotypes can be reversed or reinforced. Too often they are reinforced, so that girls who enjoy maths and science, but who can do other things well, like languages, and reading, are encouraged towards ‘people’ careers. This ‘sideways’ factor was discovered after analysing the results from PISA.

It may be a cliché, but ‘what you can’t see, you can’t be’ explains a lot when it comes to women in tech and computing. The role models aren’t there. Anywhere in the world, only around 15% of computer-science professors are female. At school, girls get used to seeing male science teachers. Conversely, girls really are used to seeing female doctors, dentists, and vets – one of the reasons that girls now outnumber boys when it comes to taking biology at more advanced levels.

The worst part of it is that where women have been part of the discovering – like Rosalind Franklin (DNA), like astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967 (her supervisor got the Nobel Prize), or the ENIAC women – their work was disappeared or handed over to the men to take the glory.

We don’t all have to make groundbreaking discoveries. Women don’t have to be ‘the best’. Women need to be everywhere,

By 1989, Tim Berners-Lee had successfully launched the internet. The World Wide Web would connect the world.

Not quite. The web is not the internet. But it was the killer application that made it ubiquitous .

Every breath we take. Every move we make. Our clothes, our boots, our motorcycle … Not Big Brother. Big Tech.

It is humans who have turned the dream – the reality – of global connectivity into a 24/7 for-profit surveillance state. It is humans humans need to worry about. AI is still a tool. We aren’t at the AGI stage yet – there is no ‘other’ to blame. It’s down to us.

This is the truth that the "regulate AI" techbros are trying to distract us from. It's not AI that needs regulated, it's them.

Luminate argues that data isn’t the new oil – an extracted raw material that powers our digital world – data is the new CO2 – a pollutant that affects everyone.

The conference was largely made up of white men – as is the advisory board of the Future of Life Institute. If diversity isn’t present in the planners at the planning stage, then we get the same issues we see in the biased data-sets. AI doesn’t have a skin colour or a gender – by making it mostly white and mostly male at every stage, we’re reinforcing a problem we need to solve.

Your data is locked until you ask for it

Hiding you in a crowd

homomorphic encryption.

Using or changing your data without unlocking it to see it

There is a doomful strain among humans. People pass away. Families die out. Dynasties collapse. Empires fall. History is told as a series of End-Times. And eventually one big End-Time. Sky-God religions are all built around End-Time. Toytown will be destroyed. Heaven will scoop up the Saved.

I do not believe that human life is more valuable than other kinds of life on Planet Earth, or more valuable than Earth herself. And neither will any government, when it is expedient to fight the next war.

Peter Thiel, PayPal founder, early Facebook investor, billionaire and Christian, brought up by evangelicals, is a co-founder of the Seasteading Institute. Thiel loves the idea of free-floating city-states. He doesn’t love taxes, regulation, or democracy.

After World War Two, rocket technology was made possible by the ex-Nazi Wernher von Braun, whose V-2 rockets had blitzed much of London. V-2 might sound techy and sci-fi – in reality it was shorthand for Vergeltungswaffe 2, which means ‘vengeance weapon’, and it was personally ordered by Hitler to be used against Britain. The V-2 was built by concentration-camp prisoners in conditions so foul that more were killed making the rockets than were killed by V-2 blasts. The USA rehabilitated von Braun, and many other prominent Nazi scientists,