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  • Published: 22 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473593152
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $24.99

12 Bytes

How artificial intelligence will change the way we live and love

Formats & editions
Paperback
24 Jan 2023
EBook
22 Jul 2021
Audiobook
22 Jul 2021
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How is AI changing the way we live and love? This is the hugely entertaining, eye-opening new book from the Sunday Times bestselling author.

*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES AND EVENING STANDARD*

Twelve bytes. Twelve eye-opening, mind-expanding, funny and provocative essays on the implications of artificial intelligence for the way we live and the way we love - from Sunday Times-bestselling author Jeanette Winterson.

In this original, deeply researched and lively new book, Jeanette Winterson traces the history of the AI revolution. She talks to some of the boldest and most imaginative thinkers in the field and looks to religion, myth and literature to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are just around the corner.

When we create non-human life-forms, will we do so in our image? Or will we accept the once-in-a-species opportunity to remake ourselves in their image?

What do love, caring and attachment look like with a non-biological life form? And what happens to the gender binary?

What will happen when our destiny is not contained by physical bodies, and our destination is not planet Earth?

With wit, compassion and curiosity, Winterson tackles AI's most urgent talking points, and asks readers to consider their role in imagining a more just and equal future.
  • Published: 22 July 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473593152
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn’t work out.

Discovering early the power of books she left home at 16 to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. 27 years later she re-visited that material in the bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She has written 10 novels for adults, as well as children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.

She believes that art is for everyone and it is her mission to prove it.

portrait photo of Jeanette Winterson

Also by Jeanette Winterson

Night Side of the River
Hansel and Greta
Frankissstein
Love
Christmas Days
The Gap of Time
Written on the Body
See all

Praise for 12 Bytes

Thought provoking and necessary

Guardian

Briskly and breezily, it [12 Bytes] joins the dots in a neglected narrative of female scientists, visionaries and code-breakers

Claire Armitstead, Observer

12 punchy, fact-laden and witty essays... Her writing engulfs you in lucid, fairytale-like realities that take you on gender-bending and time-warped explorations of religion, love, sex, and sexual identity.

Charlotte Cripps, Independent

An unusual and entertaining read...[12 Bytes] is inflected with the same delightful, dry humour as the rest of her work... With its imaginative, insightful and wide-ranging essays, 12 Bytes will undoubtedly prompt readers to begin their own circlings around AI.

Laura Grace Simpkins, New Scientist

Aspects of this AI future are frightening...[and] for any non-scientist wanting to understand the challenges and possibilities of this brave new world, I can't think of a more engaging place to start.

Stephanie Merritt, Observer

Quite brilliant.

i

This is, among other things, a very funny book... we are hardly short of dystopias, fictional and otherwise. Winterson's approach is much richer and more fun: a kind of comparative mythology, where the hype and ideology of cutting-edge tech is read through the lens of far older stories.

Steven Poole, Spectator

[Winterson's] essays...are agile, fascinating, richly varied and beautifully idiosyncratic.

Joanna Kavenna, Literary Review

Winterson... is always passionate and provocative.

Johanna Thomas-Corr, New Statesman

Refreshingly optimistic.

Steven Poole, Guardian

Lively, frequently laugh-aloud funny...the 12 essays use a combination of history, literature, religion, science fiction and electronics to extend our mental horizons.

Christina Hardyment, The Times, *Audiobooks of the Year*

[Winterson] reflects on the history - and future - of technology in essays that whirr with anarchic intelligence

Daily Telegraph

What makes this audiobook essential listening is not just its content...but the electricity of Winterson's narration. Lively, funny...the 12 essays in 12 Bytes use history, science fiction and electronics to extend our mental horizons.

Christina Hardyment, The Times, *Audiobook of the Week*

Wry, reflective and acerbic essays looking at the impact of artificial intelligence.

Guardian