When we meet, Winterson is just back from China, where, she tells me, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fictionalised account of her childhood, has sold more than a million copies in the past six years; more than 200,000 mostly young women tried to come to see her speak. She thinks this is because, in a world of long work hours and looming AI-engendered precarity, this fictionalised account of her own escape from an entrapped childhood gives readers permission to imagine a different future for themselves. She has since written 13 novels for adults, as well as nonfiction, short stories, children’s books and screenplays.
Now she wants to persuade the production company Goalhanger to give her a podcast. Until the Industrial Revolution, change was all about “Mother Nature and the slow process of becoming”, but then we “massively intervened. And that’s a decisive moment.” Computing, 70 years ago, was another step.
Artificial intelligence – which she would prefer to call alternative intelligence – is next, and “an evolutionary leap. AI is much more than a tool.” Given this, a certain understanding of the irreducibly human – our feelings, our imaginations, our centuries of study of who we are and what we have done – must be central to how well or badly things might go. She’s often strikingly optimistic about it.
She imagines a relationship with AI, for instance, where you can “have a chat to your system. It’s going to look at everything. It’s going to go at such speed.
It’s going to look at transport. It’s going to look at utilities. It’s going to look at employment, going to look at job hours, going to say, ‘What do these weird things called humans thrive on?
And have they always liked it?’ We could do this in a genuinely utopian way and say, ‘Right, we’re going to make it better.’” We are at a deeply significant moment of choice, she believes, that mirrors the choice we had in the Industrial Revolution – namely, “What future shall we build?” But in failing to distribute its gains fairly, the Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of unprecedented wealth for the few and unprecedented levels of misery for the many – a state of affairs many predict is not only already echoed but will be dwarfed by the fallout from AI: a permanent underclass, entire continents left behind and starved of current sources of income. Not to mention the environmental impact of datacentres at a time when the world can least afford it. The problem is not AI, she insists, but us.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
