Am I a robot?

12 Bytes: How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love

by Jeanette Winterson (Vintage, 2021/2022)

This was Love(lace) at first byte. The book begins with a lively survey of the history of AI. This is no dry chronology but a tale bursting with brilliant personalities, none greater than Ada Lovelace, the Countess computer programming pioneer, for whom Winterson rails against the sexism which marginalised her genius even well beyond her lifetime – a pattern with brilliant women that is repeated again and again until the present.

The radical changes brought about by the industrial revolution and the factory system prefigure the yet-more-revolutionary Information Age that we now inhabit. New technologies provided a huge lift in working people’s income and life expectancy, while simultaneously tying them to industrial servitude. Skilled crafts were replaced by the mindless tending of the power looms. Now we fear that AI-driven robots will take our jobs. Negotiating these unsettling times has a familiar ring from history, from the Luddite frame-breakers to contemporary off-gridders. But whatever stance we take, it seems the super-rich stay in control, exploiting workers, women, minorities and the marginalised.

Throughout the book she is alert to how new technologies have been used by the rich and powerful to exploit the rest of us. What should free us, often appears to perpetuate the white male hold on power. Corporations like Google and Facebook become the new global empires, amassing fortunes and political clout. All on the foundations of our data, freely if unthinkingly given. We have surrendered our privacy to the false god of Choice.

The incredible pace of Progress – if such a thing really exists – from Arthur C Clarke’s sci-fi of satellites and instant communication, to the “my-fi” of personalised connectedness is bewildering. But while we are heads-down in our social media echo-chambers, the landscape has shifted to a near future where we are once again cogs in someone else’s machine. Or should that be some Thing else?

Quantum Computing always seems to be just next week, but it is certainly nearer than it was yesterday. The much-vaunted and over-hyped AI could so quickly find that the A now stands not for Artificial but Alternative, and we will be rubbing shoulders with entities which have literally indescribable (and unanalysable) capabilities. Will all of us be left behind?

Winterson’s writing sparkles with intelligence and rests on some hard-graft research over many years studying the field. She perfectly captures our concerns and discomfort about AI. Will it cross the line to being in some way “alive”? Does the question even make sense? Surely, it’s not long now: not If but When things around us pass the “Turing Test” and at least sound indistinguishable from humans. But in confronting these preoccupations, the author cleverly turns the questions around: instead of fearing a soulless Frankenstein’s monster, shouldn’t we be asking if we humans, biological machines produced by evolution – do we have souls at all?

This book began as separate essays. Some repetition is understandable. And some variety in styles: in the third section the writing is choppy. One sentence, one paragraph. But the writing has room to breathe. We are given room to think.

I enjoyed some unexpected historical threads (1700-year-old Gnosticism; the triumph of Aristotle versus Democritus; the origin of vampires) and the visionary speculation (will AGI be Buddhist? has the first 1000-year-old person already been born?) Perhaps the most intriguing and eye-catching part of the book is the section on “love, sex and attachment”, dealing with human-machine interactions. AI pets and carers and companions are already with us. What are the psychological benefits or problems that emerge from these relationships? How do we overcome the problems of training AI systems on flawed, incomplete, biased databases that already produce algorithms that perpetuate gender and race discriminations, or even amplify them. And I have to mention that I now know more about sex robots than I ever wanted to…

I detect one blind spot in all the discussion about the degrees of intelligence that non-biological AI “lifeforms” might achieve. There is an orthodoxy that with enough connectivity and complexity in an electrical substrate, general intelligence (not just narrow “expert” system competence) will somehow spontaneously emerge. Similarly, it is thought that a scaling of quantum-based computing will allow human minds/brains to be “uploaded” and exist in a disembodied state or transferred to another arbitrary medium. This overlooks the neutro-science and philosophy of those like Antonio Damasio who trace the origins of higher-level nervous systems (including consciousness) to the embodiment of emotions. And emotions are incarnated – we genuinely feel with our gut as well as our amygdala. Without feelings we lack motivations, values. These things are more basic than reason, whether the logic exists in synapses or microchips. Much of the future-mongering is actually still rooted in idealistic Enlightenment blinkers.

I loved this book. It is provocative, open-minded and entertaining. Jeanette Winterson is a distinctive voice: she is sharp, often sparklingly witty and her barbs against inequality are always on the money. She prefers the term “alternative” to “artificial” intelligence, and she provides us with alternative ways to think about a future that is already at our door.

Elsewhere on the Bookshelf

• Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine by Hannah Fry (Black Swan, 2019) – another very readable exploration of algorithms and AI, from the point of view of the mathematician and broadcaster.
• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (Gnome Press, 1950) – a classic series of prescient short stories. This was the starting point for my teenage fascination with science fiction, but soon to be everyday technology.
• Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818) – the original is fascinating, with much more exploration of the life and thought of the creature, who is more cultured and thoughtful than the endless retellings suggest.
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (“GEB”) by Douglas Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979) – this is a playful and profound exploration of mathematics, art and music, to illustrate the ideas about cognition emerging from self-referential, fractal structures. It shaped my thinking throughout the 1980s.
• The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua (Penguin Books, 2015) – an award-winning steampunk graphic novel. This is so much fun!
• The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio Damasio (Pantheon, 2018) – one of a series of books in which Damasio develops a persuasive argument about the primacy of feelings over reason, at least in the evolution of nervous systems and brains.