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by Jeanette Winterson

Would you choose that? What if dying is a choice?

Women need a beacon, because external and internal prejudices are still running full throttle.

Women don’t build the platforms or write the programmes. Even fewer women are in tech start-ups. Why is all this vital, future-facing technology male-dominated? Explanation? Well, take your pick.

Sex differences exist, of course they do – but they are biological, and as such they don’t affect intelligence or aptitude. Gender differences are a social construct and as such they manifest differently at different times in history. Nobody now would claim, as Victorian physicians did (they were following the science, of course), that a disease called anorexia scholastica affected women, and only women, who studied maths.

Does it matter if the wind makes the music, blowing through bells and pipes? Or if a piece of software makes the music? Or if Bach does? Or if you do? I am not suggesting equivalence of quality – and that is a different debate – only whether or not the who or the what is misleading. Set against that thought is the fact that the biggest touring bands in the world are still old-fashioned (and increasingly old-aged) guys who write their music and play their instruments. But this is probably the end of an era. As David Cope puts it: ‘The question isn’t whether computers possess a soul but if we possess one.’

Mary Shelley may be closer to the world that is to come than either Ada Lovelace or Alan Turing. A new kind of life-form may not need to be like a human at all (the cute helper bot or the virtual digital assistant may be just a distraction, a sideline, a bridge. Pure intelligence will be other) – and that’s something that is achingly, heartbreakingly, clear in Frankenstein. The monster is initially designed to be ‘like’ us. He isn’t and can’t be. Is that a message we need to hear?

Ultimately – and Ada was right about this – the uniting link between the operations of matter and abstract mental processes is to reimagine – completely – what we call ‘real’. This reimagined ‘real’ will soon be what we call the world.

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.

Progress. What do we mean by the word progress? Technical innovation? Social change? Living standards? Education? Equality? Globalisation? For everyone? Lessons from the past show that governments need to legislate in order for innovation to benefit the many and not the few. In the 19th century we start to see legislation working to enact what we took for granted in the 20th century: Factory Acts to limit working hours and to mandate paid holidays. Rudimentary health and safety in factories and the workplace.

Education for children. The idea of childhood as a protected period in the life of a human being. Unionisation to provide job security and a living wage. Sanitation (drains, sewers, running water) and street-lighting paid for by taxing corporations. Slum-dwelling legislation. Affordable public transport for workers. Libraries for working people. Night school. Even city parks. 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.

Can we regain control of ourselves? Depends on what you believe about human nature.

In such situations a human makes a split-second decision. Autonomous vehicles will have to be programmed ethically – if that turns out to be the right word – ahead of time, and they will run according to programme … until the spooky day when they rewrite their own programme. And drive us all off the cliff we deserve.

Skinner’s end-of-life observation in 1990 that ‘a person is simply a place where something happens’ seems to be confirmed by social media. That a person might not be a place at all, but a carrier of history, a second chance at the future, a being capable of love, a moment that is not capturable, an interior force, a private act with public consequences, but not ultimately public – in the way a park or a shopping mall is public – is what? Romantic? Foolish? Wrong? Or a view of the self that is worth sustaining?

Privacy is friction. In economics-speak, friction is the opposite of flow. Friction is whatever impedes the data flowing from you and all that you do, to the interested parties who want to make money out of you, and/or control/nudge your behaviour. It is as simple as that.

Neuroethicist Marcello Ienca (ETH Zürich) has proposed four rights for the technology age: 1) The right to cognitive liberty 2) The right to mental privacy 3) The right to mental integrity (protection from brain-jacking) 4) The right to psychological continuity

Gnosis, in Greek, means ‘knowledge’, but not the knowledge that comes from study; rather, a knowledge of the ultimate essence of Self and World. We know the word in English from agnostic, and Albert Einstein called himself agnostic – someone who doesn’t ‘know’ rather than someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of God, in whatever shape or form. Gnosis isn’t science; science depends on objective measurement and repeatable demonstrations, and how do you measure a deep sense of what is known – that can’t, at least at the time, be proved by any available method or metric?

Intelligence, certainly, and consciousness, probably, is proving not to be dependent on biology. That shouldn’t be such a surprise. Every religion in the world starts from that premise. Intelligence begins with a non-biological being or beings who create our world, and us. The things we value as being uniquely human don’t start out in any mythology or religion as human values. They are transmitted to us from non-embodied beings who don’t live in a 3D world. As humans move towards a more blended virtual and material world, what ‘is’ and what ‘isn’t’ will not be obvious. Slowly, but surely, which is which won’t matter. Matter will not matter.

Reality is not made of parts but formed of patterns. 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.

I don’t believe that compassion is only a human trait, and neither do billions of humans – dead and alive – because it is what a creator-god is said to feel for ‘his’ creation. God is not human. All our visions of ‘God’ are of a non-embodied networking system. Where no god is present – as in Buddhism – the network is the totality, and the totality is the network.

Do we want to live forever? Would we be human if we did?

There is no reason to believe that humans can only develop meaningful relationships with other humans. In fact, the evidence points in the other direction. We accept the deep bond between humans and animals. Most of us believe the animals in our lives understand us. And when we wind back in time to our own childhood, we realise that we spontaneously formed important relationships with non-human, non-biological, ‘non-living’ creatures of all kinds. Perhaps not even creatures. I had a wall I used to lean against, believing it welcomed me. Here is Pepper, a semi-humanoid robot designed by Soft-Bank Robotics. Some of you may have met Pepper at London’s Eurostar terminal. Pepper is a social-interaction robot designed as a helper-bot. Able to recognise faces, and to respond to greetings and questions, Pepper works in stores, schools, social care, and sometimes in private homes. Results vary. Some folks love the child-size wide-eyed bot. Other users get bored once the initial attraction wears off. Strangely, an entity that is always friendly can seem a little irritating. At least to adults. Kids like it.

Watson went on to opine that women working in science make it more fun for the men, but probably the men are less effective. And that, women were told, was because their brains were made of different matter – or just not enough of the grey matter. The Victorians used to call it the ‘missing 5 ounces’. I love that.

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 have been telling stories since time began – on cave walls, in song, in dance, in language. We make ourselves up as we go along. Who we are is not a law – we’re not like gravity. We are an ongoing story.

Brain size or not, women seem to be able to move into male-dominated areas, no problem, when social prejudice ebbs. But how does that translate into the ‘hard’ sciences? (Don’t you love the language?) Why aren’t women going into computer programming? Why aren’t women studying electrical engineering? Or bioengineering? Women aren’t building the platforms (hardware), or coding the software. Women aren’t in tech start-ups. Only 37% of tech start-ups had a woman on the board in 2020 (SVB Women in Technology Report). According to a 2019 EQUALS research report, overall, women make up between 17% and 20% of humans involved in AI, computing, and tech. Software engineers are mostly male, at a ratio of 80% to 20%.

Are we saying that women can’t manage to master (watch the language) computing science? If you can qualify as a doctor you have already excelled in science at school. It’s a new twist on the Nature/Nurture debate.

Biology is destiny if you work for the patriarchy.

All over the world women are working to change reality. Reality is what we make it. The stories we tell each other about each other – as individuals, as groups, as nations, as human beings – shape reality. We need true stories about women’s abilities, and we need stories every day about the gains for society that can be made when women are treated as equals with men. Equal chances lead to equal choices. If we don’t get better stories about women, then the distortions of the past will warp the future. And it’s not just down to women to tell these stories. Men need to be honest about their gender bias so that women can get with the programming.

I don’t want to confuse empathy – which depends on both self-awareness, and awareness of others (I know how you must be feeling and how I would feel in this situation) – with the ability to predict behaviour – yours, mine, or a bot’s.

It is easy to manipulate human beings. We are vain, gullible, quick to anger. Interested in a quick buck – wanting to be liked, even when we are really not likeable, full of self-pity, hoping to blame the other guy, but for all our jealousies and failings, most of us have never wanted to put ourselves up for sale in the way that things have turned out. Humans are more than money. Humans are motivated by community. We are interested in helping others. We aren’t just faking it – not just playing for ‘likes’. Compassion is real. The good that we are, the good that we are capable of, needs nurturing. But what in our world is actively committed to nurturing us to become good citizens, good people?

Getting smarter won’t solve our human problems – any more than tech will solve our human problems. What’s faulty in us, to put it simply, because it is simple, is not about thinking at all. Our problem is love. We are smart enough to know this. It’s why every religion pitches a sky god, or gods, whose nature is unconditional love. Love is the highest value. Yet for all of history, love has also been seen as a weakness, as a diversion, as a spanner in the works in the fight between rationality and emotion. Love has been relegated as women’s work – the invisible mending that holds families together, that holds societies together, that gives a man something to keep him sane, at the same time as driving him mad. We have taken love and disembodied it – throwing it back into the air at our divine super-self, something for the gods to manage. But also, in a contradictory and compensatory gesture, we have fatally embodied love in women, who, as men are told, ensnare with love’s ties, at the same time as being the sacred keeper of love’s flame. Men, who have until lately written most of our literature, philosophy, and religious texts, have a tough time with love. We know they do because they have left an endless record of their struggles.