Jeanette Winterson - 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next

Also by Jeanette Winterson

Novels

Oranges Are Not the

Only Fruit

The Passion

Sexing the Cherry

Written on the Body

Art & Lies

Gut Symmetries

The Powerbook

Lighthousekeeping

The Stone Gods

The Gap of Time

Frankissstein

Comic Books

Boating for Beginners

Short Stories

The World and Other Places

Midsummer Nights (ed.)

Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12

Feasts for 12 Days

Novellas

Weight (Myth)

The Daylight Gate (Horror)

Non-fiction

Art Objects: Essays in Ecstasy and Effrontery

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Courage Calls to Courage

Everywhere

Collaborations

LAND (with Antony Gormley and Clare Richardson)

Childrens Books

Tanglewreck

The Lion, the Unicorn and Me

The King of Capri

The Battle of the Sun

12 BYTES

HOW WE GOT HERE WHERE WE MIGHT GO NEXT

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Grove Press

New York

Copyright 2021 by Jeanette Winterson

Jacket details: woman Michael Nelson/Trevillion Images; portrait of Ada Lovelace by Alfred Chalon Science Museum/SSPL; frame Getty Images

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First published in 2021 in the UK by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage.

Published simultaneously in Canada

First Grove Atlantic edition: October 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5925-0

eISBN 978-0-8021-5926-7

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

These essays are for my godchildren, Ellie and Cal Shearer. And also Lucy Reynolds. Lucy is studying the past in order to understand the present and the future. (That is what the humanities are for.) Ellie is writing her own books now. Cal is in a lab in Oxford, building a brain.

In 2009 4 years after it was published I read Ray Kurzweils The Singularity Is Near. It is an optimistic view of the future a future that depends on computational technology. A future of superintelligent machines. It is also a future where humans will transcend our present biological limits.

I had to read the book twice once for the sense and once for the detail.

After that, just for my own interest, year-in, year-out, I started to track this future; that meant a weekly read through New Scientist, Wired, the excellent technology pieces in the New York Times and the Atlantic, as well as following the money via the Economist and Financial Times. I picked up any new science and tech books that came out, but it wasnt enough for me. I felt I wasnt seeing the bigger picture.

How did we get here?

Where might we go?

I am a storyteller by trade and I know everything we do is a fiction until its 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. The dream of life-forms, not human, but alongside the human. Other realms. Other worlds.

Long before I read Ray Kurzweil, I read Harold Bloom, the American Jewish literary critic, whose pursuit of excellence was relentless. One of his more private books in that he was unravelling something for himself is The Book of J (1990), where Bloom looks at the earliest texts that were later redacted and varnished to become the Hebrew Bible. The first 5 books, the Pentateuch, were written around 10 centuries before the birth of the man Jesus so they are separated from us by around 3,000 years.

Bloom thinks that the author of those early texts was a woman, and Bloom was certainly no feminist. His arguments are persuasive and it delights me that the most famous character in Western literature God, the Author of All was himself authored by a woman.

In the exploration of this story, Bloom offers his own translation of the Blessing the Blessing promised by Yahweh to Israel but really, the blessing any of us would want. And it isnt Be fruitful and multiply thats a command, not a blessing. It is this: More Life into a Time Without Boundaries.

Isnt that what computing technology will offer?

Bloom points out that most humans are fixated on space without boundaries. Think about it: land-grab, colonisation, urban creep, loss of habitat, the current fad for seasteading (sea cities with vast oceans at their disposal).

And space itself the go-to fascination of rich men: Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos.

When I think about artificial intelligence, and what is surely to follow artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence it seems to me that what this affects most, now and later, isnt space but time.

The brain uses chemicals to transmit information. A computer uses electricity. Signals travel at high speeds through the nervous system (neurons fire 200 times a second, or 200 hertz) but computer processors are measured in gigahertz billions of cycles per second.

We know how fast computers are at calculation thats how it all started, back in Bletchley Park in World War Two, when the human teams just couldnt calculate fast enough to crack the German Enigma codes. Computers use brute force to process numbers and data. In time terms, they can get through more, faster.

Acceleration has been the keyword in our world since the Industrial Revolution. Machines use time differently to humans. Computers are not time-bound. As biological beings, humans are subject to time, most importantly our allotted span: we die.

And we hate it.

One of the near-future breakthroughs humans can expect is to live longer, healthier lives, perhaps much longer, even 1,000-year lives, if AI biologist Aubrey de Grey is right. Rejuvenation biotechnology will aim to slow down the accumulation of ageing damage in our organs and tissues, as well as repairing or replacing what is no longer fit for purpose.

More life into a time without boundaries.

And if that doesnt work there is always the possibility of brain upload, where the contents of your brain are transferred to another platform initially not made of meat.