Author Jeanette Winterson, who describes herself as a storyteller by trade, has spent years examining how artificial intelligence might reshape existence. In her 2021 collection 12 Bytes, she explored the notion that every human advancement begins as a fiction before manifesting as reality. Her engagement with these futures is long-standing; her 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, depicted a post-climate disaster landscape inhabited by ageless humans and robots, while her work Frankisstein preceded her deep dive into AI. ‘I am a storyteller by trade,” writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes, an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking series of essays in which she considered just how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. “And I know everything we do is a fiction until it’s a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across. She had already been thinking about our possible futures for at least 15 years – her 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, for instance, imagined a post-climate catastrophe world populated by robots and humans who never age, while 12 Bytes was preceded by Frankisstein: A Love Story, which alternates a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor’s travels among present-day cryogenecists and. Now she wants to persuade the production company Goalhanger to give her a podcast. “I want to do one called The Rest is Human,” she says, sitting at a bare wooden table in her home, a Georgian set of rooms above a shop – which she also owns – in Spitalfields, east London. “To see what we retain for ourselves in this absolute scramble to outsource everything we thought we were.”. And “an evolutionary leap, artificial intelligence – which she would prefer to call alternative intelligence – is next. Given this, a certain understanding of the irreducibly human – our feelings, our imaginations, our centuries of study of who we are and what we have done – must be central to how well or badly things might go. For instance, where you can “have a chat to your system, she imagines a relationship with AI. Going to look at job hours, going to say, ‘What do these weird things called humans thrive on, it’s going to look at employment. We could do this in a genuinely utopian way and say, ‘Right, we’re going to make it better. Monopolised to such a degree that it becomes the worst prison imaginable,” as told in Joanna Kavenna’s brilliant 2019 dystopian novel Zed. “That is a real possibility,” she says. “And t, of course it can be corporatised. They didn’t read them as warnings about how to preserve what’s good in us, and the thing is.
Winterson’s influence remains significant, particularly in China. Returning from a trip there, she noted that her debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit—a fictionalized account of her upbringing—has reached over one million sales in the last six years, drawing large audiences of young women. She believes this popularity persists because, in an increasingly algorithmic world, readers crave authentic human stories. When we meet, Winterson is just back from China, where, she tells me, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fictionalised account of her childhood, has sold more than a million copies in the past six years; more than 200,000 mostly young women tried to come to see her speak. In a world of long work hours and looming AI-engendered precarity, this fictionalised account of her own escape from an entrapped childhood gives readers permission to imagine a different future for themselves, she thinks this is because. As well as nonfiction, short stories, children’s books and screenplays, she has since written 13 novels for adults. When we meet, Winterson is reading Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and reiterates Lepore’s argument that we are now living “the sci-fi books that these [men who are] ruling the world read when they were 13.
We are currently at a pivotal juncture for our species, according to Winterson. She frames human progress until the Industrial Revolution as being defined by Mother Nature and the slow process of becoming. That trajectory shifted dramatically 70 years ago with the advent of computing. Now, she argues we face a defining choice: what kind of future will we build? She remains cautiously optimistic, envisioning systems that could revolutionize utilities, transportation, and work-life balance, provided we act with intention. The Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of unprecedented wealth for the few and unprecedented levels of misery for the many – a state of affairs many predict is not only already echoed but will be dwarfed by the fallout from AI: a permanent underclass, entire continents left behind and starved of current sources of income, but in failing to distribute its gains fairly.
The potential for failure, however, remains acute. Winterson suggests that if we fall into a dystopian reality, it will be due to applying archaic, 19th-century economic thinking to an entirely new technological era. She characterizes the belief that endless, meaningless labor is virtuous as a relic designed to maintain societal hierarchies. While she admits we are currently on a path to mishandling this transition, she attributes this to leaders who rely on obsolete models of competition and resource extraction. This doesn’t matter, this is a transition.”, this is not the end.
Beyond economic failures, there is the issue of inherent bias.
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on human data, which means they frequently replicate our historical prejudices and flawed moral assumptions. Winterson, who has spent 14 years as a professor of new writing at the University of Manchester, stresses that technology alone is not the issue; rather, it is the moral framework of the people constructing these systems. She calls for the integration of artists and public intellectuals into technological development, insisting that the arts are not merely leisure but an essential, emotional, and imaginative engagement with reality. Not to mention the characters and the moral imaginations of those developing it.
Winterson also explores the Silicon Valley obsession with transcending the human body and escaping the planet, viewing it as a secular form of religious pursuit—a solution to the problem of death. She finds it fascinating that science and religion have begun asking the same fundamental questions about consciousness for the first time since the Enlightenment. Yet, she reminds us that AI remains entirely dependent on physical infrastructure, specifically data centers, which are bound by the realities of our world. That’s why religion was invented – it is the world’s first disruptive startup.
This tech-driven promise of transcendence often requires a form of religious faith in the machines and their architects. She notes that the industry is dominated by high priests who control access to these developments. As for the role of humans in this future, she references perspectives from figures like Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, both of whom have touched on the shifting requirements for workforce survival in an automated world.
The preservation of the humanities is critical in this climate. Winterson champions the need for critical thinking and historical understanding, especially as concerns rise about the literacy of future generations entering the workforce. The stakes are immense: while some, like former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, have raised alarms about catastrophic risks, Winterson emphasizes that the potential for positive outcomes is equally significant.
Ultimately, Winterson echoes the sentiment that AI could be our final invention. She insists that there is no inevitable dystopia and that humanity retains the agency to define its trajectory. By moving away from winner-takes-all economic models and centering human creativity, we may yet find a way to navigate this transition without sacrificing what makes us human.
