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The internet of things

What it means to be human
by
October 2021, no. 436

12 Bytes: How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love by Jeanette Winterson

Jonathan Cape, $32.99 pb, 275 pp

The internet of things

What it means to be human
by
October 2021, no. 436
British author Jeanette Winterson (photograph by Ali Lorestani/Alamy)
British author Jeanette Winterson (photograph by Ali Lorestani/Alamy)

In her novel Frankissstein (2019) – a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) that embraces robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and transhumanism – Jeanette Winterson writes, ‘The monster once made cannot be unmade. What will happen to the world has begun.’  This observation might have served as an epigraph for her new book, 12 Bytes. Comprising twelve essays that ruminate on the future of AI and ‘Big Tech’, 12 Bytes contends that looming technological advances will demand not only resistance to the prejudices and inequalities endemic in our current social order, but also a reconsideration of what it means to be human: ‘In the next decade … the internet of things will start the forced evolution and gradual dissolution of Homo sapiens as we know it.’

Diane Stubbings reviews '12 Bytes: How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love' by Jeanette Winterson

12 Bytes: How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love

by Jeanette Winterson

Jonathan Cape, $32.99 pb, 275 pp

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