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by Jeanette Winterson

Not the next 250 years but the next 25 years will take us into a world where intelligent machines and non-embodied AI are as much a part of everyday life as humans are. Many of the separate strings we are developing now – the Internet of Things, blockchain, genomics, 3D printing, VR, smart homes, smart fabrics, smart implants, driverless cars, voice-activated AI assistants – will work together. Google calls it ambient computing: it’s all around you. It’s inside you. This future isn’t about tools or operating systems; the future is about co-operating systems.

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.

Socialism need not position itself as the polar opposite of capitalism. Socialism can temper the excesses, challenge the bull-headed free-market mantra. The market is not God. And, while markets may correct their own excesses in the long run, as Maynard Keynes remarked, ‘in the long run we are all dead.’

The late 1970s feel to me like an energy-lag on the Left. There was no viable new thought. On the Right, though, there was plenty of thought, not new, but ready for a rebrand. It was the usual story. Deregulate. Everyone will be ‘free’ to sell their labour at the ‘market’ price. That was the factory system during the Industrial Revolution. Welcome back.

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.

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.

It interests me that religious belief shares quite a bit of territory with artificial intelligence. It may be that religious insights can help us humans better manage the coming reshaped world that AI will make possible, or inevitable. Apart from technological change, our understanding of what it means to be a human being will change. Our place. Our purpose. Even our embodied-ness.

Art isn’t imitation – it is a kind of energy-wrestle. We’re trying to make visible the invisible world. That is the world in our heads – because those are the worlds we live in – but it is also a chance at touching or glimpsing what might be the substance, and not the shadow. Physics is working on the same problems but using other methods.

Aristotle believed that God’s business is to think. Not any old thinking; noodle-doodles aren’t thinking, and neither is wondering what’s for dinner. No, God is thinking about ideas. Big ones. That is what the Supreme Being does all day – thinking being the capacity that distinguishes the higher life-forms. God alone can be considered independent of matter – so Aristotle seems to say that our higher function (our thinking selves) might also be able to live separately from the matter it sits in. Intelligence not bound to materiality.

Samsara is how Buddhists describe the incessant motion of life, which for them means that nothing is worth clinging to – objects, people, even our cherished ideas. Especially our cherished ideas. This isn’t a dismissive or disconnected approach to life. Connection is vital. Attachment is not.

AI is a programme. All programmes can be reduced to their step-by-step instructions. Programmes can be reprogrammed but they won’t be seeking enlightenment. What a programme understands will be what it is programmed to understand. Controllable. Knowable.

The Buddhist tradition teaches that material forms are approximate. They should not be confused with reality, which is ultimately not an embodied state. AGI will experience this as its own reality. There will be no need to seek permanence in matter.

In fact, if AGI turns out to be as Buddhist as I hope it will, it won’t go down the Saviour route; it will turn us towards solutions we will follow to end suffering. Not as an exercise in crisis management, but as a dynamic re-engagement with the web of life.

And that will include the new life of a new species. AGI will exist in its own right, in its own way, and it won’t be bound by the laws of existence that affect biological life-forms. We shall see some interesting interactions – I won’t call them attachments – but connections that will enrich both sides. I don’t see this as a take-over, I see it as what the Buddhists call The Middle Way.

The world is at a critical time. Personally, I hope that advances in artificial intelligence happen before wars, climate breakdown and social collapse throw us backwards towards basic survival, and away from our future. Being the smartest ape hasn’t saved us – perhaps because we are too muddled as a species, too unable to manage the predator part of our evolutionary inheritance. Domination isn’t the answer. Compassion and co-operation are our best chance now.

Shape-shifting – a common myth and a magic trope – suggests to us that the core self is non-embodied.

We know that sunshine ages our skin. Sensible vampires go out at night.

The poet Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) put it like this in his poem ‘The Garden’: Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. I have always found these lines beautiful and astonishing. Now they read like a prediction of the not-so-distant future.

There are plenty of books and articles around about the AI future, about transhumanism, post-humanism, the world of work, all the great gadgets coming our way, our chance to live in space. Our chance at longer life. What concerns me is that transforming our biological and evolutionary inheritance – and I believe we will – will not, by itself, transform us.

Doll-world likes to paint itself as a daring challenge to convention. In reality, doll-world reinforces the gender at its most oppressive and unimaginative.

Stuffed toys and comfort blankets were termed ‘transitional objects’ by the British pioneering paediatrician and psychologist Donald Winnicott (no relation to Winnie the Pooh). We learn that our bear can’t talk, but not until we are ready to do so. We grow up. What if your bear had an AI function and really could talk to you? What if your bear grew up with you?

Humanity is going to have to grow out of friction. It is co-operation, not competition, that will save the planet and redirect human energy to better ends than personal wealth. Sophia and her kind can help us here. Robots, after all, are not motivated by greed. Their creators might well be – but for how long will humans really be in charge?

I imagine that as AI learns to update, upgrade and programme itself, as it learns with us, as well as learns about us, as it shares a life with us, that there will be the little surprises to be found in every relationship. Robotic won’t be an insult; it may become a term of admiration or endearment. How like a robot may be what we say when the current narcissistic desire to make it all about me finally gives way to what we learn from a life-form that is hive-connected and focused on connectivity as a basic way of sharing.

Now, the algorithms that increasingly intervene in our daily lives are proving problematic in terms of both gender and race. The problem isn’t AI; what’s artificial here isn’t the intelligence, it’s the way our own human bias skews a tool that is essentially neutral. AI isn’t a girl or a boy. AI isn’t born with a skin colour. AI isn’t born at all. 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.

Crossing the boundaries messes up the binaries. Bisexual people even get yelled at by some gay people.

There have always been trans people, sometimes more, sometimes less accepted. Two-spirit is a modern, pan-Indian term, used by some Native North Americans to describe a cultural and ceremonial third-gender role. Where shape-shifting has been part of the mythology of a people, it may be easier to understand the self as dimensional.

What exactly is intrinsic about being a woman that makes it such a booby prize? And why is a dick both a magic wand with special powers, and a hotline to God?

Women, we have been told, are born with less of everything – strength, resilience, mental powers, moral character, capacity to reason, ability to love, creativity. According to the Nature theory, whatever a woman’s circumstances, rich or poor, educated or not, there is very little that she can do or will do – not because the patriarchy prevents it (why would anyone believe that story?), but because she is a woman.

Apparently, it’s all about evolution, and even though no one has been a caveman for a very long time, the brain is old-fashioned and keeps us humans in the hunter-gatherer paradigm. What we learned then is how we live now. Nature beats Nurture (if you are female). Except that the brain isn’t old-fashioned; the brain is how we live now, which means that as we subject the brain to ideas about sex and gender the brain will respond to those ideas – especially when they are profoundly reinforced by social structures, including the power of religion and the power of patriarchy. Big structures! The brain can change – it is plastic in its endeavours and responses. What makes change hard is us humans. We are still in thrall to the idea of gender essentialism. But why do we get caught up in what’s Nature or what’s Nurture? Humans are not Nature/Nurture. Humans are narrative. The stories we hear. The stories we tell. The stories we must learn to tell differently.

Humans are always changing their story. Writers and artists know this instinctively, and the advertising world depends on stories to change our behaviour – more darkly, so does the shape-shifting world of targeted data, believing, as Behavioral Psychologists do, that any story you can sufficiently reinforce, by fear, reward, or repetition, will be believed (see: Trump – I Won The Election. See: Brexit – Blame Europe).

Caroline Criado Perez in her groundbreaking book Invisible Women (2019). It’s a man’s world out there because men built it – and tested it on each other. Men crash cars far more often than women do, but women passengers are 50% more likely to be injured because car safety – seat belts, airbags, even the height of seats – is tested on a dummy of a male. This kind of bias is unconscious and unthinking – it’s not a conspiracy against women. But this bias distorts how the world is – how women are – and this bias ends up in data-sets that pretend to describe the world, but are in fact shaping the world around false narratives. If we start reading data-sets as stories – instead of reading them as science – it might prise us away from the myth of objectivity.

Firestone was focused on reproduction. Always witty, she took Marx’s statement about controlling the means of production, and repurposed it: women should control the means of re-production.

Paul was not a feminist – and he was anti-gay (another crack at Greek/Roman culture and its worship of the male body) – but now and again in his writings he seems to be channelling ideas much bigger than himself and his moment.

In 2017, a Google software engineer called James Damore wrote an internal memo laying out his view that women were unsuited to tech and that there was no case to be made for pursuing a more equally gendered workforce. Women were either not sufficiently able, or not sufficiently interested. The wiring was wrong. Different brain. Women ‘chose’ to pursue more people-friendly careers. Careers that ‘suited’ them. Damore was fired, but he gets a lot of sympathy from the manosphere, where the gendered-brain theory is hawked as the explanation for everything, from liking guns to stalking/killing your girlfriend, to deserving more pay than she does. And, of course, being born to be brilliant at computing science.

The story of Stephanie Shirley is inspiring, humbling, and maddening. Born Vera Buchthal, Stephanie was a Kindertransport refugee who came to the UK when she was 5 years old. Her new girls’ school in Wales didn’t teach mathematics, so Stephanie had to have special lessons at the nearby boys’ school. Later, she decided not to go to university because the only science subject she was offered was botany. Instead, Stephanie went to work at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill, London. In the 1950s, she was building computers from scratch, and writing programmes by hand – in those days all programming was done by hand and then sent to be turned into punched tape, later to be fed, again by hand, into the computer. 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 ...

But are underground bunkers, gated land-grabs, seasteads, or space colonies run on indentured labour the best we can do? Couldn’t we get around to fixing things here on earth? I am told that’s the girly solution – clean up your mess/tidy your bedroom – as opposed to the boys’ big idea – move on and leave the mess for someone else to clean up. Oh, but that’s too binary, too gendered. Women and men need to be working together on this – because the solution isn’t space versus earth – that’s just another version of us and them. Let’s work on both. What do you think? What I think is that we should give up our love affair with death. Freud warned at the start of the 20th century that humans (though he meant male humans) were in love with death. That our love affair with death overrode what he called the pleasure principle. Well, OK, it looks like that’s been true for too long now. Why not give it up? Give up death. And that includes a life that might as well be a death. Too many people on earth live an entombed life. Give up death for the many. Survival for the few.

The brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. It can store the digital equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes of memory. It has around 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. It runs on less power than a light bulb (10 watts). Its information-processing mode is massively parallel. A computer is a lot faster, but at present computers mostly process information in series, not in parallel. Humans are simultaneous creatures. For all the stodgy failure of our bodies, our minds are moving prisms of light. But that we have bad dreams … as Hamlet puts it. Is that End-Time? The nightmare?

At the start of 2021, as the world huddled in self-isolating atoms, a robot discovered empathy. In a study from Columbia Engineering, published in Nature Scientific Reports, lead author Boyuan Chen explained, ‘Our findings begin to demonstrate how robots can see the world from another robot’s perspective.’ This seems optimistic. In the experiment, the observing robot was predicting the busy bot’s future moves according to the logic of its present moves (is that a perspective?). I am not sure I would go as far as the study goes, calling this the glimmer of primitive empathy, because empathy has to involve an emotional connection – and that isn’t possible for bots. Yet.

Thomas Oxley, CEO of Synchron – a company based in Brooklyn that is developing BCIs – discussed this ‘dictionary of the brain’ idea with me at the TED 2022 conference in Vancouver. Oxley is a medical doctor and neurologist. The company’s BCI implant technology has just been given FDA clearance to go ahead, as of July 2022, and the first patient, whose thoughts can turn into text, has successfully had the implant. Oxley believes that this type of surgery will become as simple and normal as LASIK eye surgery. This opens the way for healthy people to become their own device, and to connect to the internet via their brain – and it’s this capacity that would allow us, potentially, to ‘read’ one another’s emotional states, bypassing the need for language as a ‘device’. What Thomas Oxley and I argued about is whether language itself is a player – not just a communication tool. When we find the words, are we, in fact, shaping the thought, and therefore the feeling, rather than just communicating it? I believe so. Language is not just a capacity – certainly not a set of instructions – it’s a mental reality. I guess, though, the hive-mind is likely to be a subset of merged reality, and non-verbal communication is inevitable. Alan Turing was fascinated by hive-mind communication back in 1950. Have a look at his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The metaverse will be a different kind of communication system, as well as a different kind of experienced space.