‘I am a storyteller by trade,’ writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes, an unusual and thought-provoking collection of essays in which she considers how artificial intelligence might change every aspect of our lives. ‘And I know everything we do is a fiction until it’s a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying – or of returning.’ She had already been thinking about our possible futures for at least 15 years – her 2007 novel The Stone Gods, for instance, imagined a post-climate catastrophe world populated by robots and humans who never age, while 12 Bytes was preceded by Frankisstein: A Love Story, which alternates between a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and a trans doctor’s travels among present-day cryogenicists and AI-enabled robots. When we meet, Winterson has just returned 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 people, mostly young women, tried to come and see her speak. She thinks this is because, in a world of long working hours and growing insecurity caused by AI, this fictionalised account of her own escape from a trapped 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. ‘I want to do one called The Rest is Human,’ she says, sitting at a bare wooden table in her home, a Georgian set of rooms above a shop – which she also owns – in Spitalfields, east London. ‘To see what we keep for ourselves in this headlong rush to outsource everything we thought we were.’ View image in fullscreenWinterson: ‘We’ve got a market that doesn’t really know what education is for.’ Photograph: Posed by models; SDI Productions/Getty Images Because we are, she argues, at a turning point in our story as a species. Until the Industrial Revolution, change was all about ‘Mother Nature and the slow process of becoming’, but then we ‘intervened on a massive scale. 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. That’s what this is. AI is much more than a tool.’ Given this, a certain understanding of what is 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 is often strikingly optimistic about it. She imagines a relationship with AI, for instance, where you can ‘have a chat with 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, look at working hours, and say, “What do these strange things called humans thrive on? What do they like? 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 faced in the Industrial Revolution – namely, ‘What future shall we build?’ But by failing to distribute its gains fairly, the Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of unprecedented wealth for the few and unprecedented misery for the many – a situation that many predict is not only already being repeated 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 mentionThe environmental impact of data centres comes at a time when the world can least afford it. The problem is not AI, she insists, but us. “There is no inevitable dystopia.” If things go wrong, it will be because of “old-fashioned thinking laid over this brand-new reality.” Specifically, “the idea that meaningless endless work is good for the soul is a 19th-century madness designed to keep people in their place. Most of what we fear about AI and jobs comes down to the political and economic choices our masters will make, just as they did in the Industrial Revolution.” She isn’t blindly optimistic. She knows that “yes, we are on track to mess up this chance to fundamentally change our relationship to the world of work” – but that’s because “our masters are using out-of-date, not-fit-for-purpose economic models.”
View image in fullscreen ‘What we know about humans is they love monopolies.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
But it isn’t only the old winner-takes-all, “rational” ends-justify-the-means economic models that are the problem. Our flawed assumptions and prejudices, which form the material that large language models (LLMs) are trained on, are built into the very fabric of AI. Not to mention the characters and moral imaginations of those developing it. When we meet, Winterson is reading Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and reiterates Lepore’s argument that we are now living “the sci-fi books that these [men who are] ruling the world read when they were 13. And she said, ‘We are now all under the covers with these boys and their flashlights. And the thing is, they didn’t read them as warnings about how to preserve what’s good in us. They read them as instruction manuals.’ It’s absolutely terrifying.”
One big thing they seem to have taken from these books, and Winterson cannot help but be fascinated by, is “the ultimate goal of Silicon Valley … to get out of the body and off the planet” – not least because she is so aware that humanism, in which everything is brought back to ourselves, our perceptions and our bodies, is historically so recent. People say, “These are machines, you can’t have relationships with them,” she says. “I look at them and say, ‘billions of people on this Earth right now are having their most profound relationship with a non-biological entity they call their sky god.’ Right? It’s always been so! We are absolutely primed not to worry about biology being everything about us. That’s why religion was invented – it is the world’s first disruptive startup. It’s there to say, this is not it. This is not the end, this doesn’t matter, this is a transition.”
View image in fullscreen An illustration of a mill in Leeds, during the second Industrial Revolution. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
So we’re literally making our own gods? “Totally! What tech is doing now is what religion has always wanted,” which is, at its most basic level, a solution to the problem of death. “I mean, has there ever been a time where religion and science are asking the same question, since the Enlightenment? They’re both saying, ‘Is consciousness obliged to materiality?’ And religion has always said no. And science has always said yes. And now science is saying, ‘Um, noooo.'” You know, to me, where I come from” – a childhood of fundamentalist Christianity in 1960s Accrington, and training as a preacher – “this is completely fascinating.” Later, on email, she adds, “I love my body, but I would be happy to shape shift. Happy to slip out of it into pure consciousness one day and of course people say there is no consciousness without a body, and that was the scientific belief. But now? Haha.”
I would, I have to say, argue the opposite, that advances in neuroscience, immunoloThe significance of gy and psychotherapy means it is more a matter of scientific belief than ever. Not to mention the fact that AI is also entirely dependent on a physical system, otherwise known as data centres. Although, as she points out, it’s important to remember that “the machines don’t have a limbic system. They’re only neural networks. But we’ve got two systems – we’re like a hybrid car with two powertrains, so we’ve got the neural network, our rational processing self, and we’ve got the limbic system, which is much older and that’s the fight-flight-freeze, and where all our feelings come from.” Perhaps detaching from the limbic is the next stage, she says, and it definitely isn’t all good. “Maybe we’ll decide that we don’t need this feeling machine … that is where the tech bros are heading. I don’t know if you’ve ever sat in a room with some of these bigger guys, because it’s very interesting. They are not connected to their feelings. They find them kind of bothersome.”
This tech-enabled possibility of a kind of transcendence seems to have arrived alongside a requirement for faith – in the technology, in the future it is making, in the people building that future, in its predictions both of utopian heaven and various shades of hell, all by high priests who jealously guard access to what’s actually going on. “What we know about humans is they love monopolies,” says Winterson, “because it’s a concentration of power. Of course it can be corporatised, monopolised to such a degree that it becomes the worst prison imaginable,” as told in Joanna Kavenna’s brilliant 2019 dystopian novel Zed. “That is a real possibility,” she says. “And that’s why we need people who are sort of free-range humans, who can think.”
View image in fullscreen
Winterson … ‘Show me a child that doesn’t want to hear a story.’ Photograph: Posed by models; MoMo Productions/Getty Images
The problem then is how we support – or develop – such humans. “There are basically two ways to know you have a future,” claimed Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, recently. “One, you have some vocational training. Or two, you’re neurodivergent.” Daniela Amodei, the president of Anthropic and herself a literature graduate, when asked more or less the same thing, had a different take. “I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever,” she said, because “the things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important.” Which makes the bonfire of the humanities in the UK somewhat concerning: in the year to December 2024, 4,000 jobs in the social sciences, humanities and arts were lost. Exeter University recently announced it would be cutting 150 roles, affecting eight in 10 academics in the faculty of humanities, arts and social sciences, while last month Nottingham said it would be ending its modern languages and its music degrees. At some universities the humanities, according to a report in this paper, risk being “extinguished” altogether.
Why save the humanities? One answer might be that they teach a sense of where we come from and who we are, which also feels threatened. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” one professor told New York magazine, responding to the first tranche of AI natives arriving in higher education. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” It risked, a report from MIT claimed, being a kind of generational “cognitive surrender”. Another is the processes by which people should be taught – reading, and being critical of what is read, and then having to write cogent defences of those critiques. Having to tussle your intuitions into an essayIt helps you discover what you think—and how you think—and how other people’s ideas work. Winterson, who studied English at Oxford and has been professor of new writing at the University of Manchester for 14 years, as well as teaching “a free-thinking class about creativity,” agrees. But she is dismissive of much of the current system. “Maybe I’m controversial here, but I do think higher education needs a top-down restructure. I don’t think it’s viable, and I don’t think it’s delivering in its present form.” The thing is, “We’ve got a market that doesn’t really know what education is for. Is it for jobs? Is it for personal growth? There are a lot of worthless higher education courses that aren’t helping, either. I think it’s always better, being a practical northern girl, to face the facts to start with.”
We need to think, she says, about “what’s reserved to us that isn’t going to be done bigger, better, faster, stronger by the machines. And that’s where higher education really comes in. The question sitting on top of all these things about ‘Why are these jobs going?’, ‘What’s happening in these courses that aren’t getting any applicants any more?’, is ‘What sort of humans will we need in the world to come? What are humans for? What are we going to do with us?'” And that “takes us back to the idea of, well, OK, how do you develop a mind? How do you protect a mind? Because the mind is this massive, monstrous place where anything can happen.”
And for this, “a humanist education is essential. We have to centre the human here. By changing how we educate our kids from the start, we can foreground creativity, play, problem-solving, thinking—because it’s fun to think—the arts, because humans are naturally creative. Show me a child that doesn’t want to hear a story or do a dance or paint a picture or have an imaginary friend. This isn’t imposed and it isn’t elitism. It’s us.”
Even an hour a week, she thinks, would make a difference. “Let’s ask what you think about the world. ‘Why do you think that?’ It’s not costly. It’s actually about will.” Teach maths and arts and science, she suggests, at least to A-level, even if they aren’t examined. “Of course we will specialise. We need doctors and chemists, but we also need what used to be called well-rounded people. Everything is interesting! Humans are born with a big brain. Mostly we don’t use it.”
Once past formal education, she would embed artists and public intellectuals at every level. “The arts aren’t a leisure industry,” as she puts it in 12 Bytes. “The arts have always been an imaginative and emotional wrestle with reality—a series of inventions and creations. A capacity to think differently, a willingness to change our understanding of ourselves. To help us be wiser, more reflective, less frightened people. Artists make something out of nothing every day.”
We meet before Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic to warn of a 10% chance AI might erase humanity, sending a wave of panic across the world. Afterwards, I check in about how positive Winterson is feeling now. The worst “could happen,” she repeats. But “the immensity of the good outcome is just as real as the totality of our failure to get this right.” Above all, “this is a human decision and a human predicament. This is our big chance. Maybe our last chance, just like Turing’s colleague Jack Good said when he called AI our last invention. It’s all to play for.”
We can only hope it’s not too late.Her most recent book is One Aladdin, Two Lamps. She also writes at jeanettewinterson.substack.com.
One Aladdin, Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (Vintage Publishing, £12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy for £10.39 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about Jeanette Wintersons views on AI and the future of humanity based on her essay There is no inevitable dystopia
Beginner Questions
1 Who is Jeanette Winterson
She is a British writer and professor known for novels like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit In recent years she has written and spoken extensively about artificial intelligence and its impact on society
2 What does There is no inevitable dystopia mean
It means a bad future is not guaranteed Just because AI could cause problems doesnt mean it willthe outcome depends on the choices people make now
3 What is AI in simple terms
AI is technology that lets machines do tasks that normally require human thinking like understanding language recognizing images or making decisions
4 What is a dystopia
A dystopia is an imagined worstcase societythink of a world ruled by machines with lost freedoms and widespread suffering
5 What is Wintersons main message
She argues that the future of AI is up to us We shouldnt fear technology or accept it blindlywe should shape it with human values creativity and care
6 Is she against AI
No Shes not antitechnology Shes against letting technology develop without human oversight and against treating a bad future as unavoidable
7 What does she think AI means for humanity
She sees AI as a mirror of humanityit reflects who we are If we build it with empathy and purpose it can help us if we build it carelessly it can harm us
Intermediate Questions
8 Why does Winterson say AI is a mirror
Because AI learns from human data and choices It reflects our biases values and prioritiesso it shows us what kind of society weve created
9 What common problems does she highlight with AI
She points to risks like loss of privacy concentration of power in big tech companies job disruption and the danger of treating efficiency as more important than human dignity
10 What benefits does she see in AI
She sees potential in AI for healthcare accessibility creativity and freeing people from repetitive workif its guided by human needs rather than profit alone
