Jeanette Winterson: AI Is an Evolutionary Leap, and the Humanities Are the Survival Kit

Jeanette Winterson has sold more than a million copies of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in China in the past six years, and she thinks she knows why: in an era of long work hours and looming AI-driven precarity, her fictionalized account of escaping an entrapped childhood gives readers permission to imagine a different future for themselves. More than 200,000 mostly young women tried to attend her speaking events there.

Winterson has been writing about humanity's possible futures for at least 15 years. Her 2007 novel The Stone Gods imagined a post-climate-catastrophe world populated by robots and unaging humans. Frankisstein: A Love Story alternated a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor's travels among present-day cryogenicists and AI-enabled robots. Her 2021 essay collection 12 Bytes asked 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. Sitting at a bare wooden table in her Georgian rooms above a shop she owns in Spitalfields, east London, she pitches it: "I want to do one called The Rest is Human. To see what we retain for ourselves in this absolute scramble to outsource everything we thought we were."

Why does Winterson call AI an 'evolutionary leap'?

Winterson frames this moment as a turning point in the species' story. Until the Industrial Revolution, change was about "Mother Nature and the slow process of becoming" – then humans "massively intervened. And that's a decisive moment." Computing, 70 years ago, was another step. Artificial intelligence, which she prefers to call alternative intelligence, is next.

"That's what this is. AI is much more than a tool," she says. She imagines a relationship with AI where you "have a chat to your system. It's going to look at everything. It's going to go at such speed. 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? And have they always liked it?' We could do this in a genuinely utopian way and say, 'Right, we're going to make it better.'"

The stakes mirror the Industrial Revolution's central question, she believes: "What future shall we build?" That revolution failed to distribute its gains fairly, producing unprecedented wealth for the few and unprecedented misery for the many. Many predict AI's fallout could echo and dwarf that outcome – a permanent underclass, entire continents starved of current income sources, plus the environmental impact of datacentres at a time the world can least afford it.

Is the problem AI – or us?

The problem is not AI, 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". She points to work ideology specifically:

"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, just as they did in the Industrial Revolution."

She isn't blindly optimistic. "Yes, we are on track to mess up this chance to fundamentally change our relationship to the world of work," she says – because "our masters are using out-of-date, not-fit-for-purpose economic models."

There's a deeper problem too. Flawed assumptions and prejudices, as the training material for large language models, are built into AI's fabric. So are the characters and moral imaginations of its developers. When they met, Winterson was reading Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and she repeats Lepore's argument that we're now living "the sci-fi books that these [men who are] ruling the world read when they were 13". In Lepore's words: "We are now all under the covers with these boys and their flashlights. And the thing is, they didn't read them as warnings about how to preserve what's good in us. They read them as instruction manuals." Winterson's verdict: "It's absolutely terrifying."

Is Silicon Valley building a religion?

One thing those boys took from sci-fi, Winterson says, is "the ultimate goal of Silicon Valley … to get out of the body and off the planet". People tell her you can't have relationships with machines. She counters that "billions of people on this Earth right now are having their most profound relationship with a non-biological entity they call their sky god. Right? It's always been so!" Religion, she says, "is the world's first disruptive startup".

"Totally! 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? They're both saying, 'Is consciousness obliged to materiality?' And religion has always said no. And science has always said yes. And now science is saying, 'Um, noooo.'" Later, by email, she added: "I love my body, but I would be happy to shape shift. Happy to slip out of it into pure consciousness one day and of course people say there is no consciousness without a body, and that was the scientific belief. But now? Haha."

She does flag one hard difference: "the machines don't have a limbic system. They're only neural networks. But we've got two systems – we're like a hybrid car with two powertrains." Humans carry a neural network and the older limbic system, the source of fight-flight-freeze and all our feelings. Detaching from the limbic could be the next stage, she says, and it isn't all good. "Maybe we'll decide that we don't need this feeling machine … that is where the tech bros are heading. I don't know if you've ever sat in a room with some of these bigger guys, because it's very interesting. They are not connected to their feelings. They find them kind of bothersome."

She also warns about monopolized power, citing Joanna Kavenna's 2019 dystopian novel Zed. "What we know about humans is they love monopolies, because it's a concentration of power. Of course it can be corporatised, monopolised to such a degree that it becomes the worst prison imaginable," she says. "That is a real possibility. And that's why we need people who are sort of free-range humans, who can think."

Why are the humanities burning down?

Two AI industry figures have offered competing answers on who has a future. "There are basically two ways to know you have a future," Palantir CEO Alex Karp said recently. "One, you have some vocational training. Or two, you're neurodivergent." Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, a literature graduate, had a different take: "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."

The UK's data points the other way. In the year to December 2024, 4,000 jobs in the social sciences, humanities and arts were lost. Exeter University announced it would cut 150 roles, 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. At some universities, the humanities risk being "extinguished" altogether.

The stakes are visible in the classroom too. "Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate," one professor told New York magazine, describing the first tranche of AI natives arriving in higher education – illiterate "both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate". A report from MIT called the risk a generational "cognitive surrender".

Does higher education need a rebuild?

Winterson, who studied English at Oxford and has been professor of new writing at the University of Manchester for 14 years, agrees that education matters – but dismisses much of the current system. "Maybe I'm controversial here but I do think higher education needs a top-down restructure. I don't think it's viable and I don't think it's delivering in its present form." The market "doesn't really know what education is for. Is it for jobs? Is it for personal growth? There are a lot of worthless higher education courses which are not helping, either."

The real question, she says, is "what's reserved to us that isn't going to be done bigger, better, faster, stronger by the machines". That leads to: "What sort of humans will we need in the world to come? What are humans for? What are we going to do with us?" And that "takes us back to the idea of, well, OK, how do you develop a mind? How do you protect a mind? Because the mind is this massive, monstrous place where anything can happen."

Her prescription: "a humanist education is essential. We have to centre the human here." She'd foreground creativity, play, problem-solving and the arts from the start – "because it's fun to think, the arts because humans are naturally creative. Show me a child that doesn't want to hear a story or do a dance or paint a picture or have an imaginary friend. This isn't imposed and it isn't elitism. It's us." Even an hour a week would help. "It's not costly. It's actually about will." She'd teach maths, arts and science to A-level even without exams. Past formal education, she'd embed artists and public intellectuals at every level.

As she wrote in 12 Bytes: "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 to be wiser, more reflective, less frightened people. Artists make something out of nothing every day."

What are the odds of a good outcome?

The interview took place before Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic to warn of a 10% chance AI might erase humanity, sending a wave of panic across the world. Asked afterwards how positive she feels now, Winterson concedes the worst "could happen". But "the immensity of the good outcome is just as real as the totality of our failure to get this right".

Her closing framing: "This is a human decision and a human predicament. This is our big chance. Maybe our last chance, just like Turing's colleague Jack Good said when he called AI our last invention. It's all to play for."