Jeanette Winterson and Victoria Turk: 12 Bytes

hi everyone i am victoria turk features editor at wired uk and i'm delighted to be talking tonight to jeanette winterson her new book 12 bytes is out today and we're going to be talking about that about technology where it came from where it's headed how it fits in with our lives if you've got questions please do put them in the q a function and we'll get through as many of those as possible at the end of the chat with jeanette um do keep them coming throughout and we'll get through as many as we can jeanette thank you welcome thank you you are my dream interviewer for this and i just want everybody out there to know that i am so happy to be here with you tonight well thank you i'm honored uh pleasure's all mine maybe you'd like to start just by giving us a bit of background to the book uh what inspired it what's it about i realized i was completely ignorant and that's not a that's not a feeling i like it's not a place i want to be and i thought all right the world's changing and it's it's not just about compute it is computing technology but technology itself is accelerating so fast i'm not a digital native obviously because i'm far too old for that and i thought i don't want to be just muddling around in this space this space that is the future i want to understand it if possible i want to be part of the conversation maybe i can even influence it it was really obvious to me that it shouldn't be a place where you had only tech nerds maths graduates computing scientists and physicists in on the conversation because it was going to affect all our lives everybody and that would mean perhaps something that was more egalitarian there's more democratic um where people had a voice rather than no voice and naturally i was concerned as we all are the fact that government power is waning at a time when the power of big tech which is unaccountable um not elected um but extremely powerful is on the rise and i know google wants to take over the planet and i thought well is this a good thing is it a bad thing maybe it isn't maybe also our our ideas of of how we manage society in the macro should change why do we think that we have elected representatives maybe it's better if people really under who understand how the future should look should be in charge of it the people with all the money and all the tech and i thought no no that's not right so it was really about getting involved for me and learning as much as i could and so reading as much as i could for for me that's always the way in and trying to focus on the big picture how do we get here what about religion what about art what about philosophy what about literature because we don't live in separate silos of existence do we we live joined up or we live not at all um and the idea of the kind of nerd looking at the computer screen day and night is not real life in so much as there still is a thing called real life which is bigger than a computer screen it may not always be but it is at the moment so i thought all right i need to go back into what i know study it from there and i also need to go into what i don't know and i had some questions to ask myself i thought where are all the women um because it cannot be that women have such such strange particular female brains that they're not interested in all this stuff so that rang some alarm bells um and that's a story that we follow in the book how women got out of tech because they did it wasn't that they never went in it is they were actually shoved out of it so i wanted to tell that story and i wanted to ask also well okay ai is a tool now everything that human beings have done is a tool what happens if it's not a tool anymore what happens if it sits beside us as an alternative life form and where does this start i thought it really starts with the industrial revolution which mattered to me because i was born in manchester where the industrial revolution began and i thought okay homo sapiens been on the planet 300 000 years that's not very long but the industrial revolution 250 years old you know my house in london is as old as that this is such a little short sliver of homo sapiens time and then the computing revolution which really only kicks off after world war ii you know with all the innovations necessary at bletchley park um and and this this this massive shift um that's been happening which seems to me to be an evolutionary shift on the grander scale which will affect everything so it was all of that and i thought even if you don't understand it you must try and it will be like trying to learn a new language it will be like trying to master a new discipline um and i think we shouldn't sit out there passively waiting for things to come to us we should go out and find the things that interest us and then we have a little bit of control over it you know i mean your own background we were talking earlier because you said you you were good at science and you were good at the humanities and languages and you went into languages and then you came back into science and tech and and it's exactly that that interests me the rounded picture the bigger picture the overall picture um not just it isn't a little a little tech book it just is not that and it's not the history of google or amazon or any of anything like that of wi-fi it's to try and look at us humanity you know we've developed this so what happens now great you're supposed to know the answer to that question this is the point where i say vicky what happens now i wish i knew um but you actually have quite an optimistic view i think of what happens now what happens next or maybe what could happen if we you know take advantage of the current moment where do you see ai kind of fitting into our human lives you've said it's sort of an evolutionary change potentially what does the future look like do you think god i mean predictions are very frightening aren't they i mean one of the things in this book they interested me so much and there's an essay in their call from sci-fi to wi-fi to my why you know as everything becomes personalized which is is is the buzz word um for getting more of your data and more of your money um was that so many of the dreams of the past have become the everyday truths of the present you know whether it simply this is before even ai the dream of powered flight uh for instance and in terms of ai the dream of being able to just communicate with each other across time and space instantly you know you don't need a crystal ball to do it um now you just go on zoom and that there's the other person on the end and right back in 1964 you know there was a bbc um horizon program with arthur c clarke you can get it on youtube it's fab actually they've got all this scary drumbeat music and a picture of the thames but there's arthur c clark saying in 50 years from now you know a man of course it's a man will conduct his business from bali as well as he can conduct it from london and he was talking about satellites and transistors you know and and satellites were just going up into space the russians had shoved up sputnik one so the americans had to rush in and do the same because it was the cold war battle um and the satellites would go up there uh to get take signals up beam them back down again and the transistors really which are something like out of the magic world they're like the source of sorcerer's apprentice the thing that got smaller and smaller and smaller would revolutionize computing power so you wouldn't need any more you wouldn't need bulky vacuum tubes and miles of cable yeah when you look at early computers they would fill this entire bookshop and even the size of a wardrobe would be considered a desktop back then and i thought god you know they really understood in the early days of computing technology where this might go you know jack goode um who was alan turing's pal at bletchley park and who worked on 2001 a space odyssey um with stanley kubrick he's the person who called ai our last invention and that was in 1965 because he said look if when we've done this and it's no longer a tool which it is now but an alternative life form that sits alongside us it's game over not in a bad way he wasn't a dystopian but just saying we won't have to invent anything after this a because we won't be smart enough and b because there'll be no point so i think they were really prescient and those guys and and we think of them as guys but as we will discover they weren't all guys um with this vision of where this would actually go and i think now there's a lot of naysayers saying oh no it'll never happen you'll never be able to upload your brain ai won't ever have a mind it won't have consciousness it won't be intelligent in the way we think of as intelligence um i think that's probably a very unlikely view and given that how much of sci-fi has become your everyday reality the things we could never imagine happening have happened i'm optimistic because i think this is happening it will happen and what's more important it's not not even how it's controlled or who controls it but who is in on the conversation as this thing is shaped and used and developed is it going to be for a privileged powerful few which will make them unbelievably powerful and then the gap will be too big for anyone to cross so we need to democratize this because what we're releasing now it is a sorcerer's apprentice technology it is the genie out of the bottle you know this this thing has tremendous possibilities for humankind um and it's also a thing of great terror and i don't know which way it goes whether it's dystopia or utopia because everything is neutral it's it's in the application isn't it and at the moment the application isn't quite going the way certainly that i would like you know i mean you know more about data sets than i do but given that every algorithm is trained on data sets and data sets are so skewed towards white dudes doing white dude stuff that in itself is a problem we don't want to look at a machine culture which amplifies every existing bias that we presently live under and pretends that it is neutral that it is objective you know we had all the white guys saying we're neutral we're objective this is the way the world is as though the way the world is was like gravity you know instead of being propositional you know gravity can't change the way the world is you can change so what we don't want is to pretend that machines technology ai super intelligence is telling us how to live nothing is telling us how to live except you except me except the world that we're in so i'm optimistic because of course we could change it i'm pessimistic because i think hell you know we always get it wrong what do you think well yeah i mean how do you think we could get to that reality where we do democratize kind of our vision for the future because if you look at the moment as you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation the power does seem to be concentrated into a few powerful men's hands right yeah a few problems yeah google amazon yeah they're currently fed with earth so they're trying to you know build the biggest rocket ship uh oh him he's the worst i think i think jeff bezos is the worst he's a ridiculous person um i think do i i honestly think uh you know the whole google ethos is still there i think they really believe they could do a better job than most governments and the way the governments of the world are working at the moment they're probably right and that in itself is scary and you know we've seen in the pandemic um the excitement and enthusiasm from from the big tech companies that here's a real opportunity to push things through that would take years of arguing about civil liberties about surveillance about intrusion on privacy um but they're also saying no no if your kids are being schooled at home you know let's make this fun let's make a platform for it let's make it different their kids aren't going to be schooled home um you know the rich and powerful will always have what they've always had which is the best of everything um and yes you know that is the fear but at the moment the simplest thing that we we could do is beg our governments to be a little bit more educated and a bit a little bit less ignorant you know here in in the uk we had dominic cummings um who is really just like a suicide bomber i mean i presume he'll just explode himself in time um who had a vision of the uk as some sort of science and technology dystopia where nobody from the humanities would ever be allowed to do anything and you'd have to have a computing science degree in order to even exist and that would be entirely wrong what we don't want is a place where only people who are doing maths physics computing science uh electrical engineering building the platforms doing the programming are in on the conversation and there is a kind of wall of ignorance around many people it doesn't matter what age you are you know it's not even people as old as me um you know you work in all this but it's younger people as well thinking oh it's okay um it doesn't matter that i give everybody all my data it doesn't matter that i don't have privacy anymore i think we should start thinking yes maybe it does matter and realize that in some senses it's an it's an international emergency in that this thing is developing really quickly and we don't know about it and it's not like say the manhattan project where they were developing the atomic bomb something very specific in particular with devastating consequences when it was detonated as we know but which was also constrained and contained this is not a technology which is constrained and contained it's in everybody's lives whoever you are wherever you are and that's why we need a more democratic approach and that's what we've not got and a key part of that which is a common theme throughout the book is the need for women to be involved in this i was actually really interested um you know as someone who's supposedly into tech i hadn't realized quite how much worse we'd got than we'd been in the past i sort of assumed that we'd always had this gender imbalance and yes there always was an imbalance but you found some some great examples of actually women used to be more involved in computing yes than they are today i thought exactly as you thought and i don't know why i just went along with that assumption um or rather i thought you know we were talking earlier you said people think oh it's a pipeline problem that everybody's just all moving through the system um but it isn't you know i thought at first it was something like you know the fact that in the uk at the beginning of the 20th century only five percent of medical doctors were female because just couldn't do it because you can get degrees you couldn't practice blah blah and now over 50 percent are and obviously women's brains haven't changed it's society that's changed um and i thought maybe it was something like that that there was we just needed more time because women couldn't get degrees in this country uh until the mid-century they couldn't get a mortgage they couldn't get credit to the 1970s when i was alive so obviously it's just progress we just need more progress to happen but then when i looked at it um what i discovered was a very different story and a really disturbing story some of some of you i mean some people watching this will have seen the movie hidden figures which is about the women who worked on the nasa project so revealing the work that they were doing and how they were just overlooked and undervalued as well as underpaid and then just written out until they were rediscovered and that was exactly what i was finding and that women were very much at the heart of it's not just ada lovelace and mary shelley at the beginning the visionary moment um it's following on from that um with the bletchley ten thousand people worked at bletchley park during the war and seven and a half thousand of those were women and a lot of them were doing the decoding work they were working with those vast computers colossus set and bomb um just uh working with you know these are miles of cable you know masses of vacuum chambers it's boiling hot the thing's breaking down all the time these women were electrical engineers as well as programmers and they were doing it and afterwards of course the uk had a great lead in computing technology because of what had happened during the war and women were absolutely at the forefront of that because they knew how to do the stuff but they were downgraded as clerical work and at that time computing development which came from the university of manchester it was called victoria university then where manchester i was born developing uh computers um very very male thing not so many women in there but actually women doing the physical work the programming it was really there but again clerical um the women who did the first stored computer in america were called clerical workers and when it was launched in 1946 they weren't invited to the launch they were never mentioned and they were given this machine and said figure out how to program it and this this involved differential equations as well as the physical it was like a telephone exchange of endlessly plugging in and plugging out because computers worked on decimal they're not binary so it was a massive amount of physical as well as mental work to do and they were all there and a lot of these women after the war going forward wanted to work with computers but they couldn't get promoted um in one of the one of the most brilliant women in england called name stephanie shirley and you should really anybody's watching this look at her ted talk she's nearly 90 now and she could not get anywhere in computing science after the war so she started her own company freelance computers got no work and then she started calling herself steve shirley and she was off and she only employed women and she employed women who have been chucked out of the computing industry by the uk government and there's a marvelous picture in my book of this woman called anne moffitt who is do is programming the black box for concord she's at her kitchen table with a two-year-old looking up at her that's what these women were capable of and we don't hear about it and until 1984 nearly 40 percent of computing majors undergraduates were women in 1984 some watershed happens apple launches the first desktop computer at the apple and all the ads then are geared to young men that first apple ad the teacher is a female and it's all about young brian and what he will achieve from then on the whole picture is if you're a boy this is for you if you're a girl it's not for you and it's not that women so women were just forced out they then discovered that boys did a lot of gaming at home on the computers women weren't doing it girls weren't doing it they weren't encouraged to do it so they then got to college um with prior knowledge and the girls felt stupid and the boys made fun of them and the teachers made fun of them the male teachers made fun of them and so girls just didn't have the confidence to say you um i haven't spent all my time actually i'm doing a computer game you know i've been living my life um and so of course women thought i can do something else and it's a bit like you and your story you thought i can do something else you know what i'll do something else i don't need to be with these sweaty geeky unshaven faces and we're not taking any notice of the fact that i'm really good at this or i could be really good at this so women disappeared um and so now you have all this this rubbish about women don't want to do this or women can't do this and the truth is that from 1984 um women were actively disappeared from the computing technology workforce and and that's a tragedy and if nothing else let's correct it as a fact historically and not talk about women don't want to do this you know we have ruined things for young girls and young women and we've got to fix it sorry that was a long answer no i wholeheartedly agree and i was as i was saying earlier i often despair you know the current state of things especially knowing that once actually you know representation of women was actually better than it is today you kind of think that we're always making progress and that's not necessarily the case but perhaps artificial general intelligence could have an answer for us is this perhaps a new new era for our thinking of gender you mentioned this in your book and in some of your previous work as well when we talk about transhumanism and how we might work with technology in the future could that you know free us from our binary vision of gender of men women when we become maybe part computer or more reliant on ai or using these tools in a different way where do you see that kind of fitting into our discussion of gender overall yeah i'm sure that transhuman is the new mixed race and it could be so liberating because ai is not inherently intrinsically of its nature of itself in any of the things that biological humans are it's not black it's not white it's not male it's not female it doesn't have a religion it doesn't have a gender we program all this crap in to it but the tool itself as it presently is does not have any it's that none of those attributes are inherent in the technology um you know we put our own mindset into the things that we make and and into the systems that we make um they're not neutral they're not objective and so one of the things that i'm hoping is that if if ai indeed becomes more than a tool and becomes something that can think for itself or participate in um what we're asking it to do perhaps say actually you know what no maybe this instead of that might be good then perhaps we would begin to realize that those so outmoded uh vicious savage unnecessary binaries that we live by how we're endlessly dividing and categorizing people you know are you male are you female are you black are you white are you a muslim are you a christian are you a jew all of those things by which we we label pigeonhole discriminate often against people we could see them for what they are which is simply a construct simply something we've done along the way in this 300 000 years of our evolution inheritance and we don't need them we don't need to take them forward if we chose not to we wouldn't have to and if you had an aic beside you that said should we not then that maybe that would spark a different conversation and also you know if we understood ourselves maybe as every as all the religions of the world have always understood us as not essentially bound in our biological substrate not this thing that we have to bring with us with with all its confusions difficulties and frailties if we thought no this is a joke this is part of the journey it's a steps along the way but it's not the end of the story and also we can leave things behind it's not about going into space i mean it kind of might be but the space is not the outer space it's the it's the inner space it's our space if we could move through these really restricted confined tunnels of the mind where so many people live where it's just dark and cold and horrible and lonely and into something which was bigger open there is no reason why not space is a vision it's just to tell us there are millions of stars so many galaxies so much room we don't have to live here fighting for every last resource um just at each other's throats trying to kill each other and wreck the planet because somehow we believe in scarcity and whatever ai is about it's not about scarcity it's actually about abundance and the great thing is wouldn't it be you know ai's not going to care about your lamborghini or your yacht or your fancy house or your mistresses doesn't even have to eat doesn't even have to breathe um it's our it it's a real challenge to what a what intelligence is what consciousness is how we could live where our value system would lie not in stuff not in power not in things not in binaries not in hierarchies not in divisions but in something which was genuinely equal in the sense that we absolutely understood that all this is a construct just let it go you know let it go um that would be a most marvelous thing i think i love the idea of using ai as that lens to kind of reconsider how we see each other wouldn't it be great and you know little kids we soon make them into horrible little binary numbers but they're not um this may be depressing that we think we need a sort of super intelligence to be able to do that though well unless we're telling the story backwards which is somebody who's brought up in a religious home i do wonder because you know this is the moment where you've got the parallel lines that should never meet in space are meeting because religion and science are beginning to say the same things which is disturbing i mean where i was brought up it's all you know you your body is it's it's not who you are there's a soul that lives after that this world is not your home you're not confined to this you know all that religious stuff and we've posited a sky god forever all humans have more powerful wiser who will take us home to another place that isn't here um and at its worst obviously that's just a way out of everything um but at its best it's also a vision the fact that no this is not it this is part of the journey it's not the end of the journey by any means religion has always said that this is this is this is a stage on the way and it's got caught up with all kinds of bigotries and moralities things that are false to us and useless to us but essentially the at the very core the core truth in all of that is to say you know what no i'm not just made of meat and i'm gonna die maybe i can get past this and that that interests me very much that we've we've arrived at this moment great yeah and it could go the other way though right and you sort of reference the kind of potential dystopian view um especially you know maybe with even entrenching the gender binaries that we currently have much further with the example of sex robots you can now get an ai enabled sex robot which seems to be very much uh conforming to uh sort of old-fashioned views of gender and you know they look a certain way they're all generally female they look like porn stars exactly and they're all anorexic they never weigh more than 35 kilos because otherwise their man can't drag them around the flat but some people think that this is you know a liberating thing like oh great you know this is another it's sexual liberation sex with robots yeah are so on to that and and also i'm sort of interested in china where there's a whole group that self-identifies two dimensionals which i find both touching and disturbing because they say no our real life isn't in the 3d world our real life life is conducted via the screen and this is where i felt we feel most at home i i do get that conceptually philosophically and it interests me very much and so when you've got your sex bot which also has an avatar which has an online life an online presence and can chat to her other friends you know sexbots have friends um they can go go and speak to the other girls up there i mean it's obviously the minutes man you know i have this vision that somewhere in the future some some some feminist hackers will get into the sex bot program and suddenly he'll come home saying hi darling i'm here and she'll say you get out of the place um because right now you've got a compliant 1950s bop style femaleette which is what they are then and who is can't go out because she can't go out she can't walk can't go out can't say no always wants to hear about you you know they're programmed to say how was your day darling is always there never gets older never gets fat never has a period never gets crotchety comes when you do because they've got a rogue asm button so all these guys will think see all those stupid i used to date they never used to come this one straight on how is that going to help in the real world i don't know i mean in theory i kind of get i have no personal problem with us having serious relationships with non-bio-life forms because we do anyway what else is a sky goal but a non-bio-life form and we all loved our teddy bear um we will make relationships with both embodied and non-embodied ai we will but the sex bot thing what pisses me off it's about gender money and power and it's about men doing what they can't do in the real world anymore which is dominate women that's the problem it's not that we we have this how great it might be if you know that this was in you know it could be great it really could it could be really interesting it's not interesting um because guys have got it it's kind of disappointing isn't it it's a missed opportunity the lack of creativity yeah and women don't seem to want them you know the sex bot boys haven't really sold very well because really it's a shot window mannequin attached to a dildo i mean really who needs to drag that around you know women know better than that it's very boring and either you're bouncing around on top or you're dragging him so you know women can see the inherent ludicrousness of this and they're not looking for a power relationship it's they're not looking for a power relationship which is why the things aren't selling to women i think but china india huge deficit of females because social engineering so female babies strangled and chucked the paddy field or just chucked in the river forget them so now you've got a problem where there's all these guys who will never find a woman that they might have found if we hadn't intruded on on nature's own natural selection what are they going to do and bots are really being offered as an alternative and again i have no problem with it i really don't and some women say it's great because these guys are just so awful they won't bother real women but guys always bother real women you know they work with real women don't they if they're going to sit in their room all day with their sex bot in their avatar and be two-dimensional no problem if they're out in the world what happens if you're their boss what happens if i come in for some customer service um even though even the clothes that you can buy for your bot so if you buy an executive suit which is very popular she's always got a slash up the a-line skirt because as we know every woman boss just wants to take it up the ass sorry to be so graphic on this podcast but that's what annoys me whereas the idea of little ipals robo helpers uh robo pets um boston dynamics you know i've just got some fabulous things i mean it just cheers me up when i look on boston dynamics and i see those bots dancing around because the movement has got so great now and spot the dog is just my favorite thing ever if you don't know about spot the dog go on boston dynamics all of that again it's just lovely and then we totally screw it up by saying no let's go back to the 1950s and have a sex bot ah it's interesting that you like boston dynamics squad because i think a lot of people find boston dynamics robots quite scary do they yeah you see i didn't know that they give they bring me absolute joy sometimes when i'm feeling a bit fed up i just go on the website and i have a look at them and and i find it really moving and i think yeah i could i know i could be friends with you would you want a robot companion like how would you see in your personal life or you would be crazy ai fitting in what would you i would love that yeah i wouldn't mind i wouldn't mind if it was embodied or not embodied i mean one of the things i like the thing about ai is unlike us it's not in one physical form so it can move around so you can have your eye companion at home in a physical form if you want but when you go traveling he she it whatever it is comes with you anyway as a non-embodied form so you can carry on the conversation and the embodied one at home can still do stuff so you've got this wonderful crazy vision which is the stuff of myth and legend where you're not confined you are you are actually multiple because ai is multiple it updates it upgrades it doesn't have to be one thing in one place at one time that's incredible and it may be that we discover we don't have to be one thing in one place at one time so the possibilities are for this a legion dizzying fabulous yes of course i would like to have such a thing i also know that it's very dangerous you know um but look we're all programmed on data sets aren't we you me everybody all the stuff that went in is the stuff that has made us if we're lucky we're programmed on on myriad multiple data sets so we can address our own prejudices our own biases that's what an education is for people don't get if you educate people what you're always doing is challenging the data sets that we carry around with us and one of the problems with the ai with the buzzfeed the news feeds uh the alt-right the echo chambers is exactly that you're only fed back what you already know which is the worst kind of narrow-minded data set it's it's an algorithm which is saying just do what you are be what you are and never change the glory is in the change and so if i felt this this would challenge me in a good way and i could challenge it if i could teach my ai and my ai could teach me that would be a relationship as long as the data sets kept getting yeah because we would that's what we'd be doing you see i'd be helping to update it would be helpful it would be updating me as a data set which i am and that's partly why you know we came in with this question my data set was em and there it was i just thought you are ignorant get on with it and so it's in the places that we're ignorant that we most need the help the assistance but also to be challenged with our pet assumptions our politics um we all grow up in particular ways and we have comfort zones and sometimes those are lovely and sometimes they're just in our way they're not helping us um so it's it's that continual especially as you get older trust me on this to be always challenging your data sets you know do not stop do not give up do not end um keep searching for because yourself being not one thing but multiple things yourself is here but it's also out there you can reach that other self and one of the questions that we grappled with and we were talking about a bit earlier is then you know this idea of ai and creativity like what what could ai actually be capable of obviously you're a writer you write a lot of fiction um you are creative you mentioned ada lovelace a lot in in the book um and one of her statements that um ai could never originate or a computer could never originate and it couldn't be creative in that sense what's your take on it could you see ai doing what you do or helping you to do what you do or doing what you do better one day potentially yes if it could be bothered to do anything for us i mean doing stuff for us might be like doing children's books for the two to fives was this thing developed i think okay they're fine just stick them over there with some shopping and some games and ignore them um i don't know it's i mean ada was she was you know father was lord byron the land of shakespeare all of that the idea that arch was the pinnacle of all achievement so on and so forth so she could not she she was quite right when she said that a computer could be programmed to do what we would think of as formulaic stuff which is really good at you know put in a few things that'll play with it and something else will come out the other end but she thought that originating meant no precedent something that was entirely new that would jump into the world so she had a very particular and romantic with a capitalized sense of what creativity and originality was and also that's quite a modern view it wasn't particularly a view that would have come before her father and friends who very much wanted to set themselves up as being some persons who were original in the sense that what happened hadn't gone before and a deep personal new creativity and it was because alan turing dusted her off a hundred years later um he wrote an astonishing paper in 1950 where he talked you know he a part of is called lady lovelace's objection and it was really this question of could computers ever originate anything and he read her very carefully um you know he was a modest man as well as a remarkable man he really brought ada back in after a hundred years and he thought this is interesting but i disagree with her and here are my reasons um i suspect he's right in the long run and also it will ask questions about what is creativity what is originality um what do we mean when we make something i know i believe all humans are born creative and most of us have it knocked out of us by our education about the miserable lives that we're forced to lead and by the endless weapons of mass distraction that has become technology so we're always diverted by what's outside of us instead of drawing on what's inside of us which is where creativity lies but i don't have any worries anxieties problems certainly i don't have any feelings of competition with uh an agi system as i think it would be creating its own works of whatever it will why wouldn't it um if consciousness is an emergent property because it must be because where is it we can't find it and when we die it's gone should that emerge in an ai system then that capacity for reflection and that wish also to be expressive to say this is this thing i'm thinking about this thing that's bothering me this idea that i have it's about wanting to express that isn't it so why wouldn't an ai system want to do that but possibly not to us because we may just look like you know like it just might be like writing a book for your cat not even you even your kid you might say no i often read poems to my cat but i'm not sure whether my cat takes them in let's see if we've got any questions from the audience but uh having a bit of a technology blip keep them coming through if you um if you do have questions for dinner yeah if there's any questions i'll i'll do my best to answer them yeah we were we were talking about ada a lot earlier because she is still such a figurehead of women in tech and i was saying like you know she's she's great she wrote the first computer program yeah and often kind of doesn't receive enough credit for it still people want to question you know how much involvement she actually had um yeah they do they do it's like the bronte zone you know that that end of a brother bramwell wrote all the books you know there's al there's always this terror that a woman might actually have done something that's so big that loads of guys can't get their head around it um so they they have to that but you know the truth of ada is ada and it was very hard to be an ada as a woman if she'd been adrian she would have made sense as ada the probability of there being such a person of ada is vanishingly small but their ada was glory to ada and i think one of the benefits of her which is the same i think of you and writing this book is you know she didn't come from that classical sort of tech or science background because you know in her age she actually really couldn't as a woman um but so she brings in kind of those other aspects you know the poetry and oh totally you know lord byron is the dad i mean how could she not and you know it was because byron had said that she was not ada was not to be exposed to poetry under any circumstances that her mother annabella went with who herself was a talented mathematician oh right i have to do what byron says because he's in charge and then got her a math tutor which turned out to be augustus de morgan one of the most famous important mathematicians of the age who actually said that ada was the most gifted pupil i.e boy that he had ever taught you know so ada was on to something there's no point you know a a load of middle-aged mediocre males coming along and say ada wasn't gifted her math tutor said she was the the best student he'd ever taught so you know i'm going to go with him but it's also so important to bring in those different views not just from a gender perspective from a quality perspective but you know drawing on religion history culture art yeah often it's sort of considered those are like the nice to have so you know they're not really relevant to ai but you make the case that really they they are absolutely central because everything begins as an act of imagination nothing exists uh until someone has imagined it thought of it and then it becomes 3d then it goes out into the real world so how we feed our imaginations is so important again we're back to the data set you know what size is your mind that's what i want to know and i want bigger minds i want better minds i don't want narrow small fearful minds and that's why it's so important especially humanity students you know what's the point of history history is to tell us not to make the same mistakes again please and that's why the book talk starts with the industrial revolution and says actually you know in some senses we have been here before um we have completely changed the course of human evolution we're not on horseback sitting in front of the fire wearing wool suits now um and having to write a letter that will get there in three weeks we've done such a lot and the factory system the awfulness of it the hideousness of it the cruelty of it for a hundred years before benefits began to trickle through we don't have to do that um we we now have lessons from history and we have lessons about women we have lessons about class you know the great thing ep thompson the great historian of of working class people said look class is not a thing like house or it's a relationship we know that we create underclasses we create the dispossessed they don't naturally occur you know like i said they're not gravity it's not a phenomenon you can't do anything about there's a volcano eek we've all been covered in lava you know it's up to us to do these things and yes that's why you need people in the humanities in the arts um not least because everybody's sci-fi prediction that people in the humanities and the arts thank you very much have predicted is coming true uh and that matters so let we all need to bring our expertise our thoughts our imaginations our quirkiness our madnesses you know our humor our difficulties into this and build it all together it's not something that can be be built over there in a warehouse where nobody can go i'm going to put to you some questions from our audience now oh um alexandra asks one huge advance in technology posing big ethical problems would be the artificial womb what are your thoughts on that thing well alexandra no this is this is interesting because again it depends on your approach um you know we got one of the things i talk about in the book is is to look at how feminism managed all of this stuff um you know freud said biology is destiny so if you're a woman you are the person who's going to have to have the children and look after them at least in the early years and that that has certain implications and consequences and we know this and many women who are in pioneers in their field chose not to have children because they knew the patriarchy wasn't going to help them and you know literally girls you can't do it all so we're in this situation and in the in the 1970s when a great early feminist shulamith firestone an early tech feminist and she was absolutely vilified by her feminist sisters and she was troubled difficult annoying but also a visionary and she was always roofing on whatever ideas you know um you know just just as marx has said that we had to seize the means of production show them firestone said no women need to seize the means of reproduction and she took the freud thing about biology's destiny and said it will be great girls when you don't have to do this there are other ways of continuing uh the human race well right now will it even be the human race i mean suppose we did become transhuman suppose we we do become blended um is giving birth going to be what it always has been in the last 300 000 years maybe not so maybe maybe as our biology changes then our ideas about what biology is will change in terms of women you know we won't simply have to think about ourselves as the the child bearing sex we may be able to be free from that in a good way now the dystopia part of that of course is that there are plenty of many would like to get rid of women all together and see our biological function as being our only function do not underestimate misogyny do not underestimate it i wish i wish it were improving when i look on on the web i don't believe it's improving there is such hatred and i don't know why truly i don't know why you know there's a lot of great guys out there um but also we're still living in the patriarchy and there is still violent misogyny which results not just in deaths and murders every day but in the utter there's a confinement and misery of women across the world so that's real so if if if we stopped physically bearing children what would it mean it could mean liberation or it could mean in absolute hell because everything at this moment you know we're poised it's the whole world it's not just tech it's utopia dystopia isn't it it's like we could be going to a really good place on this planet or we could just screw it all up and everything goes back to the stone age either that's climate change that is so real and apparent and that will dash all our hopes of moving forward with technology because we'll be you know we're looking for a bit of bread and cheese not worrying about who's programming the computer so there is that but i i don't think it is necessarily a problem that women's biological function could change it isn't necessarily a problem that doesn't mean it won't be a problem so it's good that alexandra's raised it both excitement and caution yeah i mean look i haven't had any kids a because i knew i'd be a bad mother and i don't like being bad at stuff um and also because i thought there's loads of things i want to do and i certainly won't be able to do those things uh and given that i'll be a bad mother anyway put all my energies into being a good mother so lots of women do make those choices um on the other hand if if there have been another way of doing it well who knows maybe i would have done that interesting interesting potential futures um kathy has a question on the politics of this um and how can government approach the capture of their citizens data more democratically so what you know what's the solution what policies could emerge taxing major corporations is such a nightmare apparently so can we hope that governments can get ahead of this game when they're currently so far behind what's what's yeah but they're deliberately far behind there's no reason for this there's no reason taxing corporations is not difficult you tax them and you make it you make it worthwhile we just cooperate and we do it we don't let them have these terrifying amounts of cash which makes them more powerful than individual countries you know bill gates is richer than individual countries let alone tech companies google you just do it if you want to distribute wealth then you have to be firm about it it's not going to strangle they love these words don't they so violent it's not going to strangle entrepreneurship and enterprise um it's going to help to distribute wealth you know personally i like paying taxes and i would like to start a campaign to say to people you know paying taxes is great first of all it means you've done well you've earned lots i had a huge tax bill last year and i thought fantastic you've done really well and not then you want to put into the civic structure that you support and that supports you if we had a propaganda campaign saying paying taxes is wonderful like they do actually in the scandinavian countries um you know they're much more pro-tax in the sense that people understand what they're doing and what they're getting we could do that and we could stop this absolute rubbish that tech companies somehow are so important um you know they're like feudal monarchs of old that all the revenue flows to them you know that that's that you know that that's the crown all the revenue flows to the crown uh and then it's distributed as and when the crime wishes you know that's what you've got with tech companies at the minute you know we got a better system than that as we faltered along with democracy so it's really time to stop apologizing for democracy stop being on the back foot um stop this absolute rubbish that entrepreneurs and innovative people will be strangled if they have to pay attacks or or just do their duty to the rest of us not so we would actually do better i believe um it's just that there's no will you know we've got a crap government in the uk um they've been in pioneer for 11 years they're they're not interested in any of this um they're ignorant they're backward and that's why we're not seeing change but that doesn't mean we couldn't see change again it's that back to this business this is propositional this is what we choose when people say oh we can't do this the question is why not and then we get some answers you know we switched to the euro overnight back in the day when we did suddenly every single banking system and financial system aligned overnight they were prepared they did it you saying we couldn't do it again with taxing tech companies globally not just european white of course we could overnight if there was the political will and you touch on this a bit in the book that obviously the whenever there's a big technological shift there's also a big social impact and we saw this with the industrial revolution and as you say it took you know a century or so so it really didn't be pulled up yeah from the misery that that caused um and you kind of i think come to the conclusion that actually capitalism is probably the best system that we have but that it's much more flexible than maybe people think and actually not necessarily incompatible with socialism in many respects it's not it's not um i admire capitalism because it is darwinian in the true sense in that it survives and adapts to the circumstances what we've got now is vulture capitalism disaster capitalism extraction capital it is horrible but you know you even have to monetize your bed on airbnb whoever had to monetize their bed jesus and that's called the sharing economy um you know we have to think about these things and well why do we just passively go along with all of this in every ipo whether it's uber but what are they taking they're taking your money um this isn't a sharing economy but it could be you know capitalism itself does allow people flexibility agency certain amount of empowerment but it needs to be tempered um by compassion which is what socialism offers you know marx said marx is great people should read march instead of going on about when marxian radical left-wing people just read the guy mark said that socialism is there to provide for our human needs he said we need shelter we need security we need education we need access to food and then we can provide for our human needs by which he meant you know we could get on with the things that actually makes human life interesting but if you're trying to do three good three jobs in a gig economy how can you ever manage your inner life your human needs you know you're just struggling to survive and that's and capitalism should not have brought so many to this place you know in the 60s when president kennedy said a rising tide lifts all boats it looked like it was true because after the war the whole boost to sort of shift the world onto prosperity really worked for a while look i'm the generation who benefited from that um until we had neoliberalism in the late 70s thatcher reagan there was the whole business 30 years where wages were high people felt optimistic about the future capitalism was working for the many not the few and then you get the reagan thatcher moment in the late 70s and it comes for all sorts of reasons you know a nixon goes off the gold standard you naturally there's the old crisis there's loads of you can look it's very simple you can just research all this everybody panics and you get the kind of neoliberal view no we're going to deregulate finance we're going to take the safety nets away everything that the social contract was after the war it has to be about all of us let's start dismantling that and at first you get a rush of energy it's like having sugar or it's like putting fertilizers on the land everybody says hey we're free you know in the 80s were all about bling and money and then gradually you realize that what you've eroded is everything that this stands on you've eroded the basics the essentials the necessaries and the whole thing is going to collapse and we had the financial crisis in 2008 and we didn't learn from it we just made poor people bail out the banking system and we carried on as we were and here we are now in this ridiculous situation um where we we're trying to put these old mindsets somehow force the new technology into the old mindsets about the few and not the many and it isn't that it is the many not the few and that doesn't mean you have some kind of communist leveling out where nobody has any chance to be themselves not at all it means this business off let's provide the basics you know i love the idea of a universal basic income what can we do this is the 21st century can we not educate our children can we not have people living in decent housing can we not provide food and water can we not provide opportunity modestly for not everybody wants to hustle and gig every bloody day not everybody should be self-employed can we not do these very simple things the answer is yes but our governments are backward and they're in a they're in a mindset that belongs actually 200 years ago to the early factory system they're not in the present you know if you start to realize that most people do not live in the present at all you know gertrude has a great phrase about it if only our contemporaries could be our contemporaries we're dealing with people who live in the past whose minds are in the past whose habits are in the past and we're now moving towards a future which is going to just shoot through all of that and we could be left with that's where the dystopia is it's the gap you know is albert camus in the myth of sisyphus where he says it's not one thing or the other that leads to madness it's the space in between them and where we're falling now is the space in between you've got the old mindset toxic limiting and you've got new technology which is actually i think libera possibilities of great liberation um and if we have you know better conversations better leadership we might be able to do something with this i'm sorry i got over excited now i think that's a good rallying cry i don't know who out there needs to hear it i don't know who out there needs to hear it but listen folks don't be disempowered um don't sit at home be involved that's the only thing we can ever do isn't it just be involved a few more questions for you okay a few more minutes please really quickly right everyone come on i'm going to do it um so celine is asking about ai and technology and fiction and what's your opinion about the current state of fiction and what it tells us about ai thinking both about male fiction and female lgbtqa plus oh god i don't know [Laughter] fiction what do i know about patients look everything that we write reflects both the time we're in and where we might get to and so you know we were talking about this earlier wasn't we that there are things that are leaping ahead making changes um seeing the future and things which which are resolutely clamped to the past you know it's like a fridge magnet that cannot get off the fridge and other people have already ripped and roared ahead so you know you are seeing both um and you know i think part of the argument that the trans argument at the moment is actually the beginning of how are we going to redefine ourselves uh as self-identified also as hybrid also as re-made not dependent on on the biological substrate that we come into the world with but what would you like to be and one of the great things that ai offers and we see it in fiction all the time but we're also going to see it in ourselves you know all those myths and legends and stories they're in every culture across time the sh the shaman um isn't caught in this body suddenly i'm an eagle suddenly i'm a greyhound suddenly i'm you suddenly you're me and and that is absolutely in the myth legend culture and now we're saying that could be a possibility for us um and and i think that you know trans folks are really at the beginning of that saying no we're not caught here we can go somewhere else's and that's that's also why you're getting the ayah and the anger and the difficulty because this is something new it's the beginning of something that's happening so you do see it in fiction um look they probably know what i hate i don't want boring conservative fiction about kind of you know here i'm living my middle class life and then what's going to happen to me i couldn't care less um i want something that brings in the the a powerful and imaginative dimension because fiction is there to yeah if you just want to read something for a couple of hours because you need to get just get out of yourself fine but if you want to be challenged if if you want to ask yourself questions for me that's really the purpose of fiction that it goes into the difficult tricky darker places um and it's not a comfort zone it's it's a challenge zone i don't know where this business about the arts of being a comfortable place ever came out because it's not you know even when you go to something which is familiar and beautiful you know i went to the opera at the weekend to glenborn such an elitist place to go i always go um oh god i was two meters away from jacob rees-mogg i had to i did have to challenge him i did say to him sir would you please would you would you please really um promote truth in public life and champion it somehow you can imagine the response that i got but i was in such a state of i know i knew it wouldn't achieve anything but i couldn't stand back anyway so you can see the kind of elitist place i was an opera is often a very conservative art form we seen to be but it isn't yeah i sat through that opera cozy fan tutor that i've sat through many times before and i thought this is such a difficult piece to see in its truth and in its own right about how we love who we love where our affections lie how easily we're deceived what gender is and the music is always on the side of the women so you've got two things going on you've got something which is very very subversive going on under what you think you're seeing and you know i looked in you know you can see all this bloody fat tory down is soaking up and i think do you not know what this is and the thing about art is that every so often it'll hit somebody and they'll think ah and then they'll go home with some kind of epiphany whether it's a book whether it's the opera whether it's picture whether it's an installation it's the moment where it rips into your comfortable place um and it's like perching on the edge of the universe and and seeing this this vast outscape of stars and you know now that you're this tiny insignificant thing but not fixed temporary we all are just temporary traffic um through the stream of time and yet we can influence things and we are influenced by what we take in and that's why i say to people if you love art support it go to it expose yourself to it because every time you are becoming something more than you are this is your data set expand it you can go there and try and close down and see nothing feel nothing here nothing which is why art can be very conservative but it's only because the relationship is denied that the person here receiving it is denying what is actually coming in i think based on your answer just there we probably know the answer to amanda's question which is if you're about to enter university as a student today would you check out the arts options and study tech do you know what i hope don't choose amanda if you can try and find a way of amalgamating it whatever that means you've got look you did it you should you should answer this question actually because go and answer it because this is your story come on oh yeah so my background is that i ended up studying languages um and then realized that actually i was really interested in science and tech so became a tech journalist and got into it that way but you don't regret your initial choice no i don't regret it because i think the same as you i think it's very important that people have that kind of rounded view of the world and there's no point becoming an expert in one thing that's really really niche if you then make that knowledge inaccessible to most other people exactly because you know you can't talk about it in a human way or you can't associate it with our everyday life yeah you're right and amanda's got to follow her heart she's got to do the things that interest her when you're a young person you must you know it's all the awful stories we know you've got to be a dentist well actually nobody should be because ai will be doing that so you have a robot pulling your teeth so everybody's trained to be a dentist goodbye um do the thing that you love of course you must do the thing that you love but at the same time you might love more than you think you love i mean that's the surprise of being human and because education continually narrows us down excuse me unless you have a very fancy education which then tries to push you out into the world if you've got an expensive education you won't be narrowed down you might manage it yourself i mean look at all those buffoons from eaton but if you go through a normal educational system you're always endlessly everything's about narrowing here's your gcses is your air levels here's what you're going to study at university you know shrink shrink shrink and we don't want to shrink we want to go outwards don't we so i would say you know you can't rely on the system at the moment because it is not fit for purpose for where we're heading um so if you have other interests follow them follow your heart but also follow your other interests and keep in the world you might like gaming you know you might want to code uh in the evenings you might all sorts of things you might want to do you want to build your own website i don't know but do everything do as much as you possibly can especially when you're young because trust me you've got more time and then you just pile it all in and then you have a chance at what i would call a meaningful life which is the only life worth living whether you're a biological human or an ai system a great note to end on thank you very very much jeanette um i think we've run out of time but it's fascinating we've gone all over and to place which ping-pong excellent and i think quite representative of 12 bytes the book as well you draw on so many different influencers well you were brilliant you made this so easy for me i mean so easy because you were there you were there you were absolutely the buddhist bee here now well thank you very much thanks everyone for joining us and thank you for your questions everyone who sent those in i hope you've enjoyed the discussion do read the book um and yes it's been great spending the evening with you thank you

Channel: London Review Bookshop

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Id: MuHU82NIdyE

Length: 61min 57sec (3717 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021