Jeanette Winterson on AI: 'There is no inevitable dystopia'

Jeanette Winterson has sold more than a million copies of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in China in the past six years, and more than 200,000 mostly young women tried to attend her talks there. She believes the appeal is no accident. In a world of long work hours and looming AI-driven precarity, her fictionalised account of escaping an entrapped childhood gives readers permission to imagine a different future for themselves.

Winterson has been writing about possible futures for at least 15 years. Her 2007 novel The Stone Gods imagined a post-climate-catastrophe world of robots and un ageing humans. Frankisstein: A Love Story alternated the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor's travels among present-day cryogenicists and AI-enabled robots. Her 2021 book 12 Bytes collected essays on how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. "I am a storyteller by trade," she wrote on its first page. "And I know everything we do is a fiction until it's a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying – or of returning."

Now she wants a podcast, to be called The Rest is Human, which she is pitching to the production company Goalhanger. "To see what we retain for ourselves in this absolute scramble to outsource everything we thought we were," she said, speaking at a bare wooden table in her Georgian rooms above a shop she owns in Spitalfields, east London.

What kind of turning point does Winterson think we face?

She frames artificial intelligence – which she would rather call alternative intelligence – as the third decisive rupture in human history. Until the Industrial Revolution, change meant "Mother Nature and the slow process of becoming", before humans "massively intervened. And that's a decisive moment." Computing, 70 years ago, was another step. AI is next, and "an evolutionary leap. That's what this is. AI is much more than a tool."

Her stance is often strikingly optimistic. She imagines a relationship with AI in which "it's going to look at transport. It's going to look at utilities. It's going to look at employment, going to look at job hours, going to say, 'What do these weird things called humans thrive on? What do they like?'" Humanity, she argues, faces a choice that mirrors the one it faced in the Industrial Revolution: "What future shall we build?"

The earlier revolution answered badly, she notes, producing unprecedented wealth for the few and unprecedented misery for the many. Commentators predict AI could dwarf that outcome: a permanent underclass, entire continents starved of income, and the environmental cost of datacentres at a time the world can least afford it. Still, she insists, "There is no inevitable dystopia." If things go wrong, it will be because of "old-fashioned thinking laid over this brand-new reality". In her words: "The idea of meaningless endless work being good for the soul is a 19th-century madness designed to keep people in their place. Most of what we fear about AI and jobs comes down to the political and economic choices our masters will make."

Are we making our own gods?

Winterson, raised in fundamentalist Christianity in 1960s Accrington and trained as a preacher, sees religion and technology converging on the same question. "What tech is doing now is what religion has always wanted," she says – a solution to the problem of death. "Has there ever been a time where religion and science are asking the same question, since the Enlightenment?" Both, she argues, now ask whether consciousness is obliged to materiality. "I love my body, but I would be happy to shape shift," she added later by email.

She is reading Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and repeats Lepore's warning that we are living "the sci-fi books that these [men who are] ruling the world read when they were 13". In Lepore's words: "They didn't read them as warnings about how to preserve what's good in us. They read them as instruction manuals." Winterson calls this "absolutely terrifying". The ultimate goal of Silicon Valley, she observes, is "to get out of the body and off the planet", and the "tech bros" building it "are not connected to their feelings. They find them kind of bothersome." Citing Joanna Kavenna's 2019 dystopian novel Zed, she warns AI could be "monopolised to such a degree that it becomes the worst prison imaginable" – which is why "we need people who are sort of free-range humans, who can think".

What does this change for the humanities?

The evidence from the industry itself points one way. Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, claimed: "There are basically two ways to know you have a future. One, you have some vocational training. Or two, you're neurodivergent." Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic and a literature graduate, said: "I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever," because "the things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important."

Meanwhile, UK universities are cutting the field. In the year to December 2024, 4,000 jobs in the social sciences, humanities and arts were lost. Exeter University announced 150 role cuts, affecting eight in 10 academics in its humanities, arts and social sciences faculty. Last month Nottingham said it would end its modern languages and music degrees. A professor told New York magazine that AI-native students risk becoming "essentially illiterate", and an MIT report warned of generational "cognitive surrender".

Winterson, professor of new writing at the University of Manchester for 14 years and an Oxford English graduate, wants a top-down restructure. "I don't think it's viable and I don't think it's delivering in its present form," she says. The core question, she argues, is: "What sort of humans will we need in the world to come? What are humans for?" Even an hour a week of creative, questioning education would help. "It's not costly. It's actually about will."

As she puts it in 12 Bytes: "Artists make something out of nothing every day." After former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon warned of a 10% chance AI might erase humanity, Winterson held her line: "the immensity of the good outcome is just as real as the totality of our failure to get this right". In the words of Turing's colleague Jack Good, she notes, AI may be our last invention – and, she says, "It's all to play for."