The AI future looks positively rosy

In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women made from latex and circuitry can learn to talk back and say no. Or, alternatively, that their ‘love dolls’ — in the current marketing-speak — have been hacked by anarchist feminist programmers. Please enjoy the next, cyborg-mediated stage of the war of the sexes.

Some men, of course, still believe that women are inherently no good with computers, a dumb prejudice that Jeanette Winterson ably rebuts in this collection of interlinked essays, with stories from early computing history and several outbursts of amusing ire. Today’s tech-bro coders might be surprised to learn that their jobs wouldn’t even exist had it not been for the pioneering work of mid-20th-century female computing geniuses such as Grace Hopper in America and Stephanie (‘Steve’) Shirley in the UK. ‘Women are as smart as men,’ Winterson remarks drily at one point. ‘I am writing this self-evident proposition because the way the world is, it is not self-evident.’

This is, among other things, a very funny book. And while Winterson might have most recently attracted publicity by burning some editions of her own novels because she didn’t like the blurbs, she is no Luddite. Rather than hand-wringingly denounce all the bad things about modern technology, she prefers to accentuate the positive, even in matters such as the possibility of having a real (platonic) relationship with a robot bear or dog: ‘I could take the dystopian view — these are false connections in a false world. But that would assume that where we are now is the uber-real.’

Indeed, we are drowning in a brown soup of fakery, and we are hardly short of dystopias, fictional and otherwise. Winterson’s approach is much richer and more fun: a kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories.