"What will this mean for humans? For creativity?
"Or do I mean, what is meaning? For humans? For creativity? We shall have to reimagine those terms: Humans. Creativity. Meaning.
"Here’s Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web:
What matters is in the connections. It isn’t the letters. It’s the way they’re strung together into words. It isn’t the words, it’s the way they’re strung together into phrases. It isn’t the phrases, it’s the way they’re strung together in the document … In an extreme view the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. (Weaving the Web, TB-L, 2000)
"Or, as E. M. Forster put it in 1910, in his novel Howards End: ‘Only connect.’"
- Jeanette Winterson, 12 Bytes: How AI Will Change the Way We Live and Love (2021)
Elsewhere in 12 Bytes, Winterson writes, “As David Cope puts it: ‘The question isn’t whether computers possess a soul but if we possess one.’“
Whether or not "we" have a soul, Winterson definitely has one, and this becomes evident very quickly in 12 Bytes. She puts herself out there on every page, and her "self" is awash with concern for the human race. Winterson asks whether, in our striving to embrace everything AI, will we lose that which makes us human?
And yet, Winterson is no doomer. She doesn't fear an existential threat from AI as much as she has an overarching concern that we may willingly give up our humanity in pursuit of convenience, control, and even immortality.
What will we have in life if we give up all meaning? Ultimately, we must not give up all meaning - and it is connections with other humans that will give us that meaning.
