Yahoo News 12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson review: will AI control us - or collaborate with us?
Around Eurovision time, I nearly had a fight with my Alexa over her refusal to “play Jaja Ding Dong” at a party we were holding. Instead, she continually pumped out Scottish electro-band Orange Juice’s Ya Ya, Ding Dong – see the subtle difference? Also, half the people in my house were Scottish that night, so I swear she was doing it to wind me up. Had we started screaming in an Icelandic accent instead I fear she’d have granted our wish, having manipulated us into re-enacting a scene from Will Ferrell’s Eurovision movie for her own amusement. Reading Jeanette Winterson’s eerie 12 Bytes, about the history and future of Artificial Intelligence, I’m looking at that little Echo Dot in my kitchen with increasing suspicion.
“Oh, AI will soon work us out,” Winterson told me in a recent chat I had with her. “We’re gullible, we’re vain, we’re susceptible. It’s already figured us out in terms of itself as a tool. It’s now in all the advanced algorithms that Facebook and co are working on to try and convince us to like things we don’t like; to want things we don’t want. So, manipulating us either for good or ill won’t be difficult.”
Winterson’s concern isn’t so much that we’re going to end up in a Terminator-style war with the machines. She’s more worried that overexcited humans are building a new lifeform and won’t realise when it’s promoted itself to become our boss. It’s a bit like that line from Jurassic Park about scientists being “too preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Except Winterson suggests “we will be the dinosaurs this time” with AI fencing us off with distractions like social media while it gets on with running the planet. “We may believe we are still World King – that might even be part of the delusion – when nothing we do matters anymore,” she writes.
Steven Spielberg’s movie is one of many pop culture references in a collection of a dozen essays that try to describe some of the most complicated technologies ever developed in ways a mass audience can understand. But then, in Winterson’s argument, AI itself came from pop culture. The inspiration for this book rose from her last one, Frankisstein, a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s classic monster novel. “A message in a bottle for the future,” Winterson calls the 1818 best-seller about life being created using electricity.
A few years later in the same century, Ada Lovelace became the first person to write computer code for the ‘Analytical Engine’ that her friend Charles Babbage had designed but couldn’t actually build. Lovelace’s theories on what computers would - and would not - be able to do echoed down through the years, until Alan Turing picked them up and used them to develop his own ideas. We now have the Turing Test, which measures whether a computer’s behaviour can be indistinguishable from a human’s. What Winterson is asking is how did a concept imagined by women like Lovelace and Shelley end up being in the hands of men like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk?
Re-examining the history of AI from a feminist perspective brings to light the extraordinary work of women such as the codebreaking contemporaries of Turing at Bletchley Park, or Katherine Johnson who helped NASA put men (not women) into space. Achievements by women were sidelined by their male bosses, such as the six women who programmed one of the world’s first computers, the ENIAC, and weren’t invited to its launch in 1946.
Winterson also takes us through the industrial revolution, when machines were supposed to make our lives easier but only made them busier and drove down wages, especially for women. The parallels with the present day, where AI watches warehouse workers even as they take a toilet break, are striking. She calls for governments to start legislating Big Tech, particularly over taxes, but concedes none of them know how.
And yet, for all the acknowledgement that AI could bring about humanity’s destruction, Winterson is optimistic that it won’t. While we argue over transgender issues today, she’s looking to a future of transhumanism, where our species has taken control of evolution. Neural implants can connect us to the web, while nanobots clean up our bloodstreams. We’re at a crossroads, creating a new type of life that can either control or collaborate with us. Where we go from here, she writes, “depends on what you believe about human nature.”
12 Bytes is fascinating and scary, but also often very funny, with Winterson’s wry observations and clear love of a good sci-fi movie keeping things moving. It is also released at a time when the future of AI, and humanity, could go in any direction. Hopefully the people building these new brains will take a look at it, too.
12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson (Vintage, £16.99)
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