Tag Archives: AI

August 19, 2025 · 12:40 pm

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next.

I may be a bad feminist, but I found Jeannette Winterson’s 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next far too focused on proving that women can be/have been computer scientists and can be/have been important to understandings of artificial intelligence. Like sure, yes, this is all true. And also so what. Okay, I know that in the case of the essays, the so what is that as we construct new forms of intelligence – or as new kinds of intelligence and beings emerge in the transhumanist future – we ought to learn from the past and create this future in more equitable ways. But it just read to me as… obvious?

Though clearly it is not obvious when it is the tech bros creating and profiting from new forms of AI and new AI products – and as Winterson argues the risk in all of this is that these men – like the industralists before them – will seek to maximize profit at the expense of the labour or women (and children). Though with AI less so the labour and more so the data or the ways in which these systems are designed, optimized (and implicitly, aligned – or not). I’d not call this one deeply researched, but with that it’s also not overly technical – and so if you wanted an accessible (and perhaps a bit surface) exploration of current (well now not so current because of the publication date of 2021 makes this ancient) technology then sure.

So while most of the book I yawned my way though, I did find the last essay (I should mention its a series of – sometime repetitive – essays about AI/technology and the past and future) on a future where a transhumanist self is defined not by intelligence but by love to be compelling. Oh I know it’s the Unitarian in me, and I know its a desire for there to be something that connects us, but that call to love as the ultimate end is well, deeply appealing. Even if Winterson doesn’t attempt to define what love is (or where, how, when it operates – or operates differently from a god BUT WHATEVER).

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August 19, 2025 · 1:27 am

God Human Animal Machine: Again

I read first Megan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine a few years ago, but returned to it this summer for another go. Rare, now, are the books I read twice and I came back to this non-fiction (!) work on the nature of consciousness and the religious dimensions of technology because in the first go-round I wasn’t sure I reached the end sure of what O’Gieblyn is arguing about what makes humans human and AI AI. Second time around and I think it’s just as fuzzy because O’Gieblyn is much more a cartographer of the philosophy of consciousness than she is a polemic writer; the argument – consciousness is something between the subject and the world – slippery for this reader to firmly hold.

What does seem ever more true of this reading in 2025 is the way in which the recent advances in AI force questions on the nature of concisousness, on who and what can claim it – as well as the intersections of technology with these ever-more slippery ideas of soul or life before-after-beyond death.

Should you be a reader wary of a dense book of philosophy: be not afraid. O’Gieblyn writes a charming first person narrative that interweaves her background in fundamentalist Christianity, her journey away from faith, her experience of addiction, and her continued questioning in ways that make the moments of exposition on the philosophy of Descartes read as a charming side quest (rather then, as they are, the heart of understanding the challenge Descartes’ disenchantment of the world has posed).

Of the many fantastic threads in the book – the interconnection of trees/mushrooms/the internet; the sentience of robot dogs; the way a profound question can unsettle our sense of identity as much as any drug – the one I found most lasting was the parallels O’Gieblyn draws between the story of Job and that of the all-knowing algorithm. Though the section is a departure, a bit, from the sections on what it is to know or constitute or explain or recognize a self (I-Thou!) it nevertheless does a spectacular job of demonstrating the rich, varied and embedded ways technology can be read through religious texts and – more importantly – religious questions. What rights do we humans have to question the all-knowing? What audacity do we have to ask ‘why’?

Anyway – it’s prompted a whole series of other readings and re-readings, so enjoy (or don’t) the next reviews on the spirituality of AI.

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June 5, 2025 · 9:22 pm

Playground: Meh?

I don’t know. Richard Power’s Playground is a book I *should like. It’s an interweaving of different characters that all converge at the end. It has (some) good writing (a lot of it, though, is over written and exhausting). There’s interesting (?) questions about the nature of humanity – how we might or might not be distinct from animals or machines. Certainly compelling questions about friendship and how our friends can define our lives.

But ultimately I’m here to report it’s pretty boring. End of the day, bottom line, if I had to read another description of a coral reef or game of Go I think I’d have hurled the book across the room.

Do we care that there’s an AI character? And that I am someone who is (ostensibly) interested in AI? Not really.

What about an intrepid woman scientist who explores the oceans trailblazing for other women (while suppressing her sexuality – there can only be So Much Trailblazing)? I guess that’s interesting enough, but somehow it reads as.. not very.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s my mood – it’s hot and I wish the air conditioning was on. Perhaps if you were to read this book in the winter it might be a different experience.

You tell me – have any of you enjoyed this one? What am I missing.

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July 2, 2021 · 6:14 pm

Klara and the Sun: Book club question time

We read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day with book club, and I’m 100% sure we should read Klara and the Sun together, too, because there are so many moments of ‘what would you do if’ that are both fascinating and (for the moment) speculative (but carry the near-future quality of only a matter of time). Mostly I can’t begin to answer these on my own during the length of nap I have to write this, and I am even more confident that having some wine and a snack sampler would make my answers better. So I offer you instead the questions I might ask and try to answer should we be gathering (with *spoilers):

  1. You have the choice to ‘lift’ your child by genetically tinkering to make them much smarter. Doing so carries some small risk of a lifetime of illness and death. Not doing so destines them to a life of subpar education/employment and social ostracism. What do you do?
  2. Your child dies. You could purchase a robot that will resemble your child in every way from appearance, to mannerisms, to speech. What do you do?
  3. Can a person be replaced in the most essential way by a robot – like not in the space of work, but in the literal replacement of a human? What qualities of human-ness cannot be replaced, if any?
  4. What and how is a ‘god’ or higher power constituted? What acts of faith and what proof of divinity do we need in order to conclude greater forces at play?

So yes. It’s an excellent book with an incredibly interesting narrator, fascinating questions to figure out and all kinds of unexpected and delightful plot moments. And given my best loved book club is still on hiatus, if you have thoughts on these questions or others… get in touch. xo

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