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).
Literary Vice 