A review by marioncromb
12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next. by Jeanette Winterson

hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

3.25

The writing in this book is very disjointed. Each chapter feels more like notes for a chapter rather than a finished product. Topics change rapidly between paragraphs in an erratic way. This is particularly true of some of the earlier chapters which are more philosophy based. Nevertheless some of the ideas are pretty interesting, if scattershot. The parallels between an artificial general intelligence and religion for example. I like that its a more hopeful look at the future of AI, while pointing out that its mainly humans that are the problem (we need to turn descartes 'i think therefore i am' into 'i love therefore i am' since we can/will build machines that think perfectly well, and what we need to solve our problems is not tech but love and cooperation) . The later chapters arent as bad disjointedness-wise. The chapter on the gendered history of computer science is probably the strongest.
The language is easy to read, avoiding jargon, but sometimes the content is a bit vague/misrepresented/uniniformed - again more like notes/a stream of consciousness than something fully researched.