Reviews

12 bytes: Cómo vivir y amar en el futuro by Jeanette Winterson

kassiani's review against another edition

4.25

Smart, informative and funny, JW draws the connections between tech and our world through historical analysis, cultural trends (fictional works revealing our obsessions) and current (inspiring and terrifying) initiatives. About re-imagining reality: AI as a tool shaped by its creators and users (which can go many different ways).
Audiobook and annotated ebook.
See the bibliography!

- Chapter 1: Ada Lovelace and Babage - end on what is human is connection (see quote) & Mary Shelley // AI (alternative intelligence); bletchley park

- Chapter 2: the accountability / responsabilities of socio-economic 'progress' - focus industrial revolution in the UK (enclosure and industrialisation) to the current big tech economy.

- Chapter 3: wifi / internet of things / smart devices, monetization of every breath you take, no privacy (behavioral data shared). End of the self? < social animals, mistaking habit for choice, taking advantage of humans' laziness. Skinner: radical behavioralism, manipulating individual behavior
'The age of surveillance capitalism' book 2019. Surveillance sold as empowerment. Battle against aging --> merging with AI. Privacy is friction, as opposed to flow. Ethical questions: neuroethicist Marcello Ienca established four neurorights: 

• the right to cognitive liberty
• the right to mental privacy
• the right to mental integrity
• the right to psychological continuity: removal / modification // Philip K Dick 'we can remember it for your wholesale'

- Chapter 4: Turing and Turing test (human level interpersonal skills vs Ada Lovelace against machines originating anything); Minsky machines managing themselves (autonomous neural networks). 1945 Louxor: papyrus codex gnostics beliefs: exploring the world's possibilities an youself, 'being made of meat is ridiculous', ignorance is self-destruction, against creed and power structures, find out for yourself. Western hatred of the body. Aristotle: after death, our light rejoins a common world of non-embodied light. AI trying to end meat-based physicality.

- Chapter 5: AI changing Buddhism (AI priest), reality as temporary illusion. intelligence not dependent on biology, blended material and spiritual world. Reality made of patterns, not matter.  Brain: parallel processing. Heraclitus: you can't step in the same river twice. Materiality as construct. Ancient Greeks: question of change --> Heraclitus: universe always in a process of becoming - Hermenades: being, stable unchangingness - Plato: unchangingness as blueprint form, on Earth only copies of the real, art as dangerous delusion, world as shadowplay (allegory of the cave // Buddhism and Hinduism). BUT "art is not an escape from the real, art is the means towards the real. It's not imitation but an energy wrestle, make visible the invisible worlds in our heads, touching the substance." // Shakespeare sonnet 53. Buddhism: reincarnation but not full continuity of soul. IDEAL: living the good life. Aristotle: reality is material, made of stuff, not shadowplay or communal illusion, geocentric view, thinking for higher life forms, intelligence not bound to materiality (hierarchy). Democritus: ideas of atoms at the core of everything // Newton: gravity as movement of atoms in the void vs Aristotle: matter made out of fours elements.
Connectivity as vital to human experience, relational, not stative and passive, flow.
Descartes: mind is all we can depend on, mind as an thing that thinks, sense impressions not as knowledge, hierarchical world. Reason vs instinct/reflex/biological conditioning. // Pavlov, Skinner. Idea: only humans can suffer as rational beings = failure of compassion, plundering of natural and animal world. Held as scientific conclusions: no constraints to exploitation. Bodies as machines idea.
Chritianity: God as love, love as supreme business of human kind.
Buddhism: advocating compassion, ending suffering, personal encounter with truth (//reformation).
AI: domain specific intelligence --> AGI (general intelligence) could pass the Turing test, reincarnation with continuity, looking for connection. Reboot of priorities with AI: against connectiveness as profit, propaganda and control. AGI: linked system, hive-mind. Domination not the answer, but cooperation and compassion, resource and skill sharing.

- Chapter 6: transcend natural limitations (lifespan increases), in science, medecine and technology. Epic of Gilgamesh: secret of eternal youth and life does not exist, earliest recorded question. Burial as act of symbolic thinking about the dead's future. Homo naledi. Stories of life and death changed in the machine age: running forever? human beings as slabs of meat (Frankestein and Polidori's vampire & Dracula). Stem cell regeneration
Transhumanism: essay by Julian Huxley, humanity as a work in progress, progressive and ethical life. Max More philosopher: post human future. Bostrom at Oxford Future institute, prosperkty boon for all. Calico, Sens (Degray). Post-humanism.
Forbes rating wealthier fictional characters .
Bio printing! What is now science began as sci fi ex: 3D printing. Cyborg Manifesto by Haraway. BUT human flaws, biases and prejudices remain. Mindset!

- Chapter 7: love and sex. female automatons (already without agency) and sex dolls (Problems of money, power and gender roles). Dr Richardson’s campaign against sex robots: reinforcing male-gaze stereotypes, objectification, commodification of women’s bodies and violence against women.

- chapter 8: communication with friends and companions. Chat bots, avatars. Robots rights! Ex: Sophia citizenship Saudi Arabia. Digital clones of the dead! // Black Mirror episode. Robot teachers: kind and patient. Company bots for the elderly: talking helps. Expansion of what is considered aliveness.

- chapter 9: fuck the binary! Human bias skewing AI - data set have gender gaps!!! Echo chambers make this worse. Queer people as defying the binary and gender norms. Your dick is not a hotline to God! Locke: blank slate theory, importance of personal experiences. Brain is plastic: can change. HUMANS ARE NARRATIVE! not nature vs nurture. the main constant is change // Parable of the sower.
Refers to Invisible Women about gender data bias. Escape the myth of objectivity.  POWER OF STORIES (see quotes)

- chapter 10: the future is not female. Anorexia scholastica (lol). Philippa Fawcett as maths genius in 1890. Against gendered-braint theory. Nature or Nurture, women are back on the outside of tech, where the most important societal changes are taking place. Bletchley park intelligence unit: women decoders. Stephanie Shirley - autobiography Let It Go, company of all-women Freelance programmers (Ann Moffatt). Women as human computers during WWII. Women programmers: Grace Hopper in the US, Margaret Hamilton. Hidden Figures movie on women behind the US space programme, ENIAC team. PB of gendered marketing, the video-game geek stereotype (male), the jo outcomes / pay gaps and the education environment = ousting women from computer science and tech.

- chapter 11: Jurassic car park. Big tech as big brother (cookies). Social credit scores & ditital social passports. Luminate & independant journalism. History told as a series of end time: human obsession. This leads to a survivalist obsession: bunkers, space race... 

- chapter 12: i love, therefore i am. Predicting behaviour (behaviourism & conditioning --> advertising industry). Inner lives hard to control but can be measured by data-harvesting. Need to regulate Big Tech. Descartes: reason is the highest value, what makes us human vs now with AI, love is the highest human value

QUOTES:
“The arts aren't a leisure industry - the arts have always been an imaginative and emotional wrestle with reality -a series of inventions and creations. A capacity to think differently, a willingness to change our understanding of ourselves. To help us be wiser, more reflective, less frightened people.”
"Humans are not Nature/Nurture. Humans are narrative. The stories we hear. The stories we tell. The stories we must learn to tell differently. Humans have been telling stories since time began – on cave walls, in song, in dance, in language. We make ourselves up as we go along. Who we are is not a law – we’re not like gravity. We are an ongoing story. As Donna J. Haraway puts it in Staying with the Trouble: ‘It matters what stories we tell to tell « other stories … it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’."
"Yes, the brain has an evolutionary past, but the brain lives now – the brain continually creates its world.
There is a world ‘out there’ (I think so – probably – maybe), but that world is subject to the stories we have to tell about it. It’s why history changes – the past hasn’t changed. The facts remain. Our understanding, our interpretation, our reading and rereading of our own narrative is what changes.
Some stories are more powerful than others – some stories enslave millions, other stories free millions. The stories are not evenly distributed or weighed, but whatever they are, they change. The Buddhists are right about that; the one constant is change."
"Yuval Noah Harari has talked about this in his lovely book, Sapiens (2015). Humans are always changing their story. Writers and artists know this instinctively, and the advertising world depends on stories to change our behaviour – more darkly, so does the shape-shifting world of targeted data, believing, as Behavioral Psychologists do, that any story you can sufficiently reinforce, by fear, reward, or repetition, will be believed (see: Trump – I Won The Election. See: Brexit – Blame Europe). Data-sets are stories. Data-sets are incomplete stories. Datasets are selective stories."

"Tech is a tool. AI, at present, is a tool. How we use our tools depends on the dominant narrative. Breaking the binary as the dominant narrative is an urgent business."
"It saddens me that human arrogance and exceptionalism has worked to separate us, not « only from each other, but from the rest of life on the planet." & chimps and bonobos
"Human animals can and do change our stories. Tech and AI is part of that changing story – but unless we can change the fixed ideas in our heads, then tech and AI could easily become the dystopian disaster so many of us fear."

"What is puzzling is why this history has been buried and distorted, and how and why women were driven out of computing science and programming to such an extent that young women now are being begged to consider what is mythologised as a male career"
"Bioengineering will make it possible to slow, and eventually reverse, ageing in biological humans. The question is: which humans? Who will have access to this brave new world? The rich? All of us? Technologies may be born neutral but they are not raised neutral. Who benefits and who doesn’t is a political question."
LOOK UP: « The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for their work on the development of CRISPR-Cas9 – a genetic editing tool capable of precisely editing any section of the human genome. It’s like a pair of magic scissors that can cut your DNA. already the tool has been used to edit crops and insects, and clinical trials are underway on genetic malfunctions like hereditary blindness and some cancers. »
"Do humans have the emotional intelligence and ethical sobriety to take the next steps? A tool is a tool. How do we use the tool? Who is using the tool? That is what matters."

"As a story, the narrative of exceptionalism stands against collaboration and co-operation (I did it my way). And it overlooks the lives, and contributions, of literally billions of people. One of the interesting things about AI is that it works best on the hive-mind principle, where networks share information. The real sharing economy is not one where everything can be monetised by Big Tech; it’s one where humanity is pulling together – that’s exactly what we have to do to manage both climate breakdown and global inequality. The biggest problems facing us now will not be solved by competition but by co-operation."
"All over the world women are working to change reality. Reality is what we make it. The stories we tell each other about each other – as individuals, as groups, as nations, as human beings – shape reality. We need true stories about women’s abilities, and we need stories every day about the gains for society that can be made when women are treated as equals with men. Equal chances lead to equal choices. If we don’t get better stories about women, then the distortions of the past will warp the future.
And it’s not just down to women to tell these stories. Men need to be honest about their gender bias so that women can get with the programming."

"What I think is that we should give up our love affair with death. Freud warned at the start of the 20th century that humans (though he meant male humans) were in love with death. That our love affair with death overrode what he called the pleasure principle."
"3D-printed house. Eco-friendly and light on resources, it’s quick and cheap to build. A 3D printer uses CAD (computer-aided design), an everyday tool for architects, designers, fabricators, joinery workshops, wallpaper makers, whatever, to construct an object using a layering technique. The material used for the layering can be plastics, composites, bio-materials, even mushroom fibre. The object can range in shape, size, rigidity and colour." Solving housing crisis & environmentally friendly
"Blue Gene, had cracked one of the most intractable problems in biology: protein folds."
" Is the media too wedded to death to notice life? But if we don’t notice the transforming changes that are ours to enjoy – if we can only fixate on what is wrong – then we will build the dystopia we fear – and AI will help us do it."

"Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, 1956"
"When I lobby for the inner life as a sacred site, as a touchstone, as a place of repair, as our integrity, as our private dialogue with our developing self, as our conscience and moral compass, as the joy of discovery, as deep connection with the known and unknown worlds of both experience and imagination, as the part of us we feel will not die, because in some sense it is passed on – as wisdom, as goodness, as an inter-generational touch across time, as the best of us, not least because it resists too much exposure to light, although it is light."
"Love is far from an anti-intellectual response. Love demands every resource we can muster – our creativity, our imagination, our compassion, as well as our smart, shiny, thinking self.
Love is the totality. No one, at the end of life, regrets love."

llouise16's review against another edition

hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.5

mchlrose's review against another edition

informative

3.25

emilio_breastevez's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

2.75

eons_19's review against another edition

informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.0

stressed_bookbug's review against another edition

informative slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? N/A
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

2.5

bellwetherdays's review against another edition

hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

thekitschwitch's review against another edition

challenging informative medium-paced

3.5

meatcutes's review against another edition

challenging funny informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

Even if you don’t understand all the science covered in the book (lord knows I didn’t), you’ll come out of it having learned something! You’ll also come out of it mad about the past and (potentially) hopeful of the future! 

humphreads's review against another edition

4.0

12 bytes is Jeanette Winterson’s newest book. It’s a non-fiction looking at the future of AI, but, and I quote “not for AI fans in particular”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fat nerd about a lot of things, but I’m not typically arsed by AI.

Despite that, I can’t believe how much I enjoyed this book. Like, you probably know that already because I’ve not stopped praising it on my stories.

From a history of computers, arguing that Frankenstein was the OG of this, to discussing the future of sex doll profitability, and how AI will impact religion, relationships, sexuality, jobs. This books covers it all and I am officially branding it as well he lovechild of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. Sapiens is pretty expected I’m guessing- this is a book about history and future. Invisible women may be a surprise comparison, but of course Winterson addresses feminism in her book.

One thing I don’t usually do is encourage you to buy a book quickly, but I think this was so so cool to read because all it’s references were current. There’s slating of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (whey), a examination of the gendered messages behind The Queen’s Gambit, the inequality throughout the Tokyo Olympics, the fact we are all sick of Zoom meetings. I could go on for ages about this book but I am TRYING not to blab too much.

As you can tell, I enjoyed this so much and it’s already standing as non-fiction I’ll recommend a lot to folk.