Jeanette on AI

Cleverness No.1

October‘26

I should confess at the outset that I approach any article about artificial intelligence with roughly the enthusiasm I reserve for dental appointments and the instructions on flat-pack furniture. I always come away feeling that the future is arriving at tremendous speed and that I, personally, have been left standing on the platform holding a sandwich. So it was a pleasant surprise to find that this one, an interview with the novelist Jeanette Winterson, is genuinely enjoyable. Winterson, it turns out, has been fretting productively about robots for about twenty years. She has written novels about them, essays about them, and, for all I know, sharply worded letters to them. She now lives above a shop in Spitalfields that she also happens to own, which strikes me as the single most sensible arrangement anyone in London can ever make. She has also just returned from China, where 200,000 young women tried to come and hear her speak.

What makes the piece worth your time is that Winterson is cheerfully, almost defiantly optimistic. She insists that AI is not a tool but an evolutionary leap. If it all goes horribly wrong, she says, it will be our fault for laying old-fashioned thinking over a brand-new reality. That's not a bad point, though it does rather assume that the people in charge will suddenly become wise, which has not historically been their strong suit. Her best riff compares Silicon Valley's yearning to shed the body and leave the planet with religion's ancient promise of life after death. She calls religion "the world's first disruptive startup," a phrase I'd quite like to have thought of myself. Winterson was raised in fundamentalist Christianity in Accrington and trained as a preacher, so she knows the territory. The interviewer, to her credit, politely disagrees with some of this, pointing out that AI lives in enormous humming datacentres and is therefore about as disembodied as a branch of Sainsbury's.

Where the article wobbles slightly is in its second half. It swerves from the soul of the machine to the parlous state of humanities funding in British universities. Both subjects deserve attention, but the join is a bit like watching someone turn off a motorway from the overtaking lane without indicating. Still, Winterson's remedies are charming in their modesty. She wants an hour a week for children simply to be asked what they think, and she wants artists woven into public life. She points out, rather beautifully, that no child has ever needed persuading to hear a story or paint a picture. The piece ends on a note of gloom ("We can only hope it's not too late") that sits oddly beside her insistence that everything is still to play for. On balance I came away more cheered than alarmed, which for an article about the possible end of humanity is no small achievement. I may even finish my sandwich now……….