YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeanette Winterson

lines on the record: 105
first: 2020-01-15
most recent: 2020-01-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“With tools, what are we going to do? Say this is the way that everybody should live in this repressive surveillance state where unless you've got a certain amount of money or nothing.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moral agents who have created philosophy, theology, webs of kindness, of progress, social justice, politics, all of that now, because we're moving to the right, seems to be disappearing. And this is a very bad time for us to be lurching back into a kind of fascism worldwide, which is what it is. Right, with these two.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so those Marks wandering around with his friend Engels who had a small factory well run. And Engels looked at the squalor and filth generated by the first industrial revolution, people living in unspeakable conditions. And he said, this is what happens when men regard each other only as useful objects. So it's the moment where you do become a machine part. But where we are now is quite interesting because You brought it up earlier about how we are becoming like machines. I think this is what happens when men regard each other only as useless objects. We're taking ourselves out of the picture. I don't just mean as useful citizens who do work in society. I mean as”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Manchester is amazing. It's like an alchemical city. Yes, it's where in England the anti-slavery movement starts. It's where the Pancurst Women's Suffrage. It's where the trade unions movement starts. Don't get me on this because we've gone forever. But right back.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, helping doing the Alpha Go program, which now the machine can be anybody playing AlphaGo, just as you already learned chess. You just put in every possible move and the machine learns it. If you show machines pictures, acts of kindness, of compassion, of humanitarian effort, the machine will learn that. But if you show the machine pictures of somebody being hit over the head with a trunche and dragged off to jail stealing from their neighbor, the machine will learn that. And I don't think we've got enough people in machine learning who are thinking about emotional intelligence or ethics. They're simply thinking in terms of utility. And that's, to me, that's frightening. Two reasons. You know, one is right back again, Manchester, where I come from, where the communist manifesto began really, because Karl Marx did everything.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we are dark. I always say Story. No, it's not. It's not. And it's the same old story of domination, which is something we could really do with unlearning, I think, at this late stage of our evolution on this planet. But I think, look, the way anybody teaches mushrooms.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cause that, or is it possible? Because you know, most of the people who created are the same homogeneous group of people who have brought us, you know, misinformation, the same people who have brought us where we are today with a lot of the tools of the internet, which many people, in theory, it's a great idea of communication, of the world being one. All the major themes of the internet are all good ones or good ideas. It's sort of a Star Trekian version of the future. And we're kind of in the Star Wars version. Yeah, we are. Dark. I always say someone's in tech, he's you're a Star Trek person or a Star Wars person because Star Wars is not as such a pleasant story.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do we teach our machines? How do you teach an empathetic machine? How would you imagine we solve that problem? Because part of this is when you were talking about Mary Shelley, this idea this monster was not educated and therefore was not at fault. In fact, Victor Frankenstein is the one at fault. The creator is at fault. What do we need to do to...”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What values matter? And I think if we're so bad at what used to be called ordinary human values of compassion, kindness, tolerance, recognition of others, then what do we teach our machines”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know it is. I know being from place to place. Yeah, and there's going to be no Faraday cage in the world that's going to be able to contain this. You know, people talk about you will invent it and we won't let it connect to the internet. That's just fanciful, really. It's going to be out there. But at that point,”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, definitely. Everything comes back to us at the moment because we're still top of the tree. And I think. When we do, if we get general artificial intelligence so that machines are not tools, they are completely independent. Picking on their own and they're making self-reflecting, upgrading, they'll be very hard to kill. How do you kill it? We don't know because it can replicate itself anywhere. It can just flip out into your phone. I'd be busy unplugging it here and it's already gone into your phone. So that's going to be tricky.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There isn't one. There isn't a Mary Shelley's monster that is created. What there is, the monstrousness in the book is the continual threat of what's going to happen if we don't get it right. And it's damaged to us in the large sense as human beings on this planet. What happens? And what happens to us in the human sense about how we manage to love? Because love isn't in good shape at the moment. It's taking a battering from every side. And I mean love both in the sense of two people trying to love each other of whatever gender, but I mean also loving the biggest sense of mercy and compassion, tolerance, kindness. The things that we thought marked us out as humans. And I wonder if they will continue to mark us out as humans, especially as we try to teach machines to learn our values. Would we include those values? I'm not sure.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To I'd like to have more than one option. That's what I think is so exciting. Oh, it's shifting. Yeah, you really could be the shapeshifter, all the shamans have dreamed about and told us could happen. But again, I'd have to trust you because you could send me off every day, you know, be the biggest crime racket anywhere, wouldn't it?”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would, and I might regret it, but I wouldn't be able to help myself. It would be just too interesting and exciting. I'd have to do it. And certainly, look, if I was going to drop dead in five years and somebody said, well, we'll upload your consciousness, or you can just die. I'd say, okay, let's do it. And then, of course, it's tricky because I'm not in my body. I'm not in my context. What of me is uploaded? And then when I'm in your laptop, because you've very kindly uploaded me. Then I have to trust you to download me into something else. And that's where it gets tricky.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. We're not moving as fast as I thought we would. But then, on the other hand, they think, look, when I was growing up in the 1960s, nobody knew anybody where I came from who was a single parent or who'd been divorced. Even somebody was black and they certainly didn't know anybody who was gay. So everybody knows somebody like that. Everybody. And that has changed. And so I'm thinking, well, maybe in another 50 years, all the uncomfortable edges where we are now, especially around trans identity, that too will have moved on. Look, providing, of course, we've got a planet for anything to move on with. Right. I mean, climate breakdown is, of course, the game changer here. There may be no third wave of intelligence, unless we get...”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like everyone plays along with it. And I know so many people who aren't like that anymore, like the traditional sense, but I've sort of been riveted looking at websites. And they're real weddings are showing and things like that. And it's sort of like, I know.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does so have a snickety persistence, you know what I mean? In terms of, I was getting married again and I was looking at some weddings. Thank you. And I was looking at the sites and they're still persistently straight, for example. Persistently. In a way that's just like,”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so I think if certainly if we're going to start A making relationships with non-biological entities that are not male or female, we can label them that way, but at least we'll see what we're doing, then that will question our obsessions with the binary. It will also mean that for ourselves, if it becomes much easier to change identity, and I think it will, then... This should, I hope, get rid of a lot of prejudice, a lot of homophobia, a lot of transphobia, and allow people to outside of the small narrow spaces that we too often live in.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I like that idea. Some of it's very freeing because it will destroy our obsession with the binary, which I think isn't both negative and outmoded now, you know, the whole binary. Explain that. Well, particularly if male or female, we've been so hung upon it for so long. We love binaries, black, white, right, wrong, rich poor, male or female. It's a way of labelling the world. It's quick, it's handy. Once you get past the obvious, it's actually restrictive and often hurtful for people to be labelled in those ways. Whatever ways they are.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. Yeah. I still love that show. It was adorable. But talk about that because the idea of right now Elon Musk talks a lot about this, these neural networks. Facebook has bought a company that can read. Rains and stuff like that. Would you want to do that? And then what does it open up, you know, from a well, from a fictional point of view, it opens up all kinds of stories of what we would become. But when you're mixing it with gender fluidity, I was surprised how you did that. I hadn't thought of it that way because people that are gender fluid, they do feel uncomfortable in the bodies they're in. And the idea that you could not just shift them in the way we do today, but completely become other beings.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally Like, you know, Yes, we'll have to, I think. I mean, this is something Ellen Musk talks about that if Homo sapiens has got any chance as a separate species, it will have to be an augmented species. This will have to be accelerated evolution for us in the biological self. And I completely see that because otherwise we will have an artificial intelligence which is smarter but isn't body dependent. You know, it doesn't eat, it doesn't sleep. It can take as long as it likes on any particular task. It's not mortal. It's not bound by gravity. And it doesn't even need to breathe, which is why artificial intelligence for space travel is such a good idea because you don't need gravity, you don't need oxygen, and you've got plenty of time. So you can explore the solar system.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it is actually a basis in religion, the idea of body of Christ doesn't matter. You're not eating the body of Christ, but it's the idea of constant reinvention of the human body, but not the necessarily the body. The same thing with the idea of artificial intelligence, how you create robots that are like people. Can you talk a little bit of this idea? Because I thought this was an interesting thing in the book. I've always thought, everyone's always like, how are robots going to be like people? But what about when people are like robots? And that's where I think you went into, which I think was much smarter because we spent a lot of time trying to humanize robots or when they open a door, we go, oh my God, well, a toddler can open a door, right? It's not like, you know, we celebrate robotic activity, but it's more that I think you were talking about in this book more is the idea of people turning into that, like, or morphing with them.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You wouldn't need it. Yeah, you'll just, you can, it'll be, you know, all those great myths about shapeshifting today. I'm an eagle tomorrow, I'm a greyhound, and the next day I'm you. All of those stories now having a basis in science. I love that.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not good. We're not going to need it. Yeah, so do I. And because I was brought up in religious, Pentecostal in a gospel tent, you know, the idea that the body is just your home for now, but it isn't the essence of you. It's always been there. So the problem with cryogenics, of course, you can have your head taken off and you can have it vitrified. But it's in the revival of the tissue where the damage comes. It's when we start heating tissue up, not when we cool it down that the problems start. So I don't, personally, I don't think cryogenics is a viable technology. On the other hand, as the cryogenic people say, look, at least you've got a chance. You know, once you're in the ground or you've been cremated, you've got no chance. Right. Good point. But going forward, if Ray Kurtzval's right and he thinks we do this in 50 years, which is massively ambitious, if you can, upload the contents of your conscience. What do you need the body?”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is my favorite. Yeah, I think, well, just thinking about with cryogenic freezing, I think that's going to turn out to be like the cassette tape of technology. We're not going to be interested in that soon. No head frozen.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that really break a huge problem. Yeah, absolutely. And so I agree. I mean, I think that. I would not want a relationship with a sex spot. And then I say to myself, but if you have a little bot running around the house and we all will, we will make a relationship with it. Because look, anybody's ever fallen in love with their teddy bear, which is all of us. We know that we can get very fond of something which isn't certainlyn't biologically alive. But we have a relationship with it. We're all going to do this. It might be sexual. It might be emotional. But we will make significant attachments to non-biological.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because when he was lonely inside his own sex doll. Say to themselves, but are not saying out loud. Well, much smaller, actually. Yeah, absolutely. And so the character making sex robus, which is, I think, removing humanity from the process of something that is about communication, the ultimate communication.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love Ron Lloyd, which was a surprise to me because I thought who can Lord Byron be? And I thought, I'm just playing with the name. I thought, I'll make him Ron Lord with a name like that. So, you know, he's a bit of a wide boy. He's made a fortune by accident out of Bitcoin. And he thinks, oh, I'll invest it in a sex doll factory when he was loaning inside. Put it together, you know, like Lego for grown-ups, and found that it fulfilled a need for him, which might fulfill a need for others. He's crude. In some ways, he's a caricature, but he also goes on a journey. And by the end, we kind of love him because he gets it. But I needed a character in there who would say a lot of the things now that people actually want to say or say to themselves, but are not saying out loud about sex, about relationships, about the backlash against feminism, about where women come in tech if they come anywhere at all. Because as we know, the global number of people working in tech, only 20% of those people are female.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the leap to the body is what was most interesting, is because I've just been talking about this a lot. You know, everyone talks about wearables and this and that, but the idea of leaping to the body where we will have ectoskeletons, well, things will be embedded in us. You do it through the character of this Ron Lord, and then we'll break and talk more about that, but talk about Ron Lord, because he's my favorite character.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything they've done. That's brilliant. And of course, you're right because we don't know what's going on in Unit 8 at Facebook or Google X. And I think the breakthroughs are going to come, not from government fundings, but from some private company, whoever gets there first will make the big breakthrough. And then we're stuffed. I think the leak to...”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was a reflective person. And what I always say in Silicon Valley, it's a miracle they can see of another monster, Dracula they can see in mirrors because they have no ability to reflect on anything they've done. That's brilliant.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. And I've been thinking about Robert Oppenheimer, you know, because the Manhattan Project, something that's always interesting me very much, the development of the atomic bomb, what happens when you split the atom, that crucial moment and all the people involved and how it impacted not just on their lives, but on the whole world from there on in. And I wanted to give a character in the book and just let the reader decide whether or not we should therefore have protocols and restrictions. Right. Yeah.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we should know better by now. You know, there are things that we could put in place to protect people. So, yeah, Victor Stein is somebody who's committed sincere, also slightly sinister. Lots of sincere people are slightly sinister, I find. Well, I agree with you.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I guess that's right. This isn't blaming scientists, inventors, anybody working in these areas. It's simply to say that we don't put in protocols until it's too late. That's my thing. And business loves this because they say, oh, no, you're going to strangle innovation.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, and in the end, Rye really exasperated, says, Look, it's not short for Ryan, it's short for Mary and brings in their past life. Sure.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so yeah, because there's a huge argument at one point with the rather boarish Lord Byron character who comes to be Ron Lord who can't understand that Rai is trans”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be confined by gender, so I gave her a double gender, and I thought, I'll make her into this young trans doctor called Rishale.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With Rice Shelly, yeah. Well, I wanted, I took the characters on Lake Geneva, the people who were there, and I thought, all right, I'm just going to move them 200 years. And then what will I do with them? So we'll meet them again. But in different shapes, forms and guises, because I was just using the basic idea that why should consciousness be obliged to materiality? It's the moment when religion and science come together, really, because religion's always been saying, ah, you're more than your body. You know, there's some essence of you that will go somewhere else when you die. Amazingly now, science is saying, well, you know, this biological body, it's provisional, it's temporary. We can get past that. We can upload your consciousness later. We'll get there. So I thought, okay, well, let's just upload this lot from Lake Geneva in 1815. Let me bring them into the now and who will they be? And I thought, well, who will Mary Shelley be? And I thought, such a shapeshifter, somebody who was bigger than herself, I thought she would not like.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Birth of the Industrial Revolution 100%. It still is. It still is. And we stuck, you know, everyone's like, oh, the internet does this without electricity. We're all nothing. Like, none of it works. I mean, eventually we'll have batteries and solar and this and that. But it's a really interesting point to make because electricity plays such a big part of it. But electricity at the time was the internet. Something I always talk about when people talk about the internet, because people talk about it as a thing constantly. You don't talk about electricity like that. You don't say today on the electrical grid, I blue dry my hair. You know, thank you for the electrical grid. We don't ever discuss it. It's just there in the background, which is where the internet needs to go in terms of as a topic, but it keeps sort of rising to the forefront as a monster, really, in some ways. So talk a little bit about how you conceive this idea. So talk a little bit about the book right now. So you have a character, you have a gender fluid character named, go ahead, explain”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She knew about the beginnings of electricity, you know, the wild Italian Signor Galvani from where we get the word galvanized had come over. And he was able to make a weak charge through a metal electrode. And he was sticking it into frogs and the frogs were leaping about. And then he got prisoners the last time before they were hanged at Newgate Jail. If you were hanged, your body immediately went for dissection. No arguments. He got some of these guys, as soon as they've been hanged, started sticking his electrodes into them. And Mary Shelley, this young girl, watched them as their eye opened again or a hand raised as if to clutch someone else. Dead people. Yeah, so all of this was swirling around in her mind, the beginnings of electricity, and she was absolutely right that electricity was going to be the discovery that was the game changer. 100%. It still is. And it still is.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, in a way, it does feel like that. I mean, she was living in the early industrial revolution. So it's really the first modern moment. You know, it's the moment when we get fossil fuels out of the ground. We know where that's taken as now. She was really aware that machines were being created that would do the work of human beings. She'd been up to Manchester. You know, my birthplace, birth of the Industrial Revolution, foremost city in Europe at the time. And she'd seen what would happen. She'd heard new vocabulary coming in, like mind the machine, a pair of hands. You know, we didn't have this before. Suddenly human beings are reduced to their body parts and they're in service to the machine. So she knew about that. She'd also, in London, because her father William Godwin, important political radical, had everybody round to his house. Because in those days, society was small. If you knew everybody, they all came, poets, philosophers, scientists, physicians, crowded into his tiny little house.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suddenly saw that there was a way of bringing the two things together, and I wanted to recreate Mary Shelley's voice experience around writing the book and what might happen later. That's what you do. Yeah, so I wanted to really give that to the reader so that they could seat themselves in that period and feel comfortable there. And at the same time, join it up. Because to me when I read it, it felt like a message in a bottle. She'd thrown this thing overboard 200 years ago and it had washed up on our shores now. And we are the first people who can read it differently because we are going to share the planet. But our life forms will be created not out of the discarded and rotting parts of the graveyard and the Chinel house, but the zeros and ones of code. But it was a fantastic vision. And now we see that.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And of course, once it goes into a machine, it looks both objective and amplified. Because machines are neutral, right? But of course, machines are not neutral. And I think the biggest question facing us as human beings, and it's something that Mary Shelley brings up, is how are we going to educate these new life forms? Because they're not always just going to be machines.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Machine learning is a real issue because we teach machines by feeding them data. But what is the data that we are feeding them?”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and of course, she was only 18 when she wrote it. We often forget that people's lives were shorter. And so they were more compressed and compact. You couldn't say, I'll do it later because there was no later. She was dead at 53. So she wrote this book astonishingly when she was on holiday on Lake Geneva with her partner, the poet Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, a few others. And she, of course, she's invented the world's most famous monster. But when I was rereading it, I began to see all the other things that are in that book that I'd forgotten about because it was many years previously. She's obsessed with the idea of education because, of course, Victor Frankenstein doesn't educate his monster. And that is part of the problem. The monster is shut out of the source and the course of human knowledge and has to learn for himself. And this is part of his own malignity because he's not taught. And I thought, wow, you know, we really need to think about how we are educating our machine.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That book. Well, I was reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein again because it was the 200th anniversary of the publication. And in 2018, 200.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't think that's true. I think also you can choose the elements of your life that you wish to include. Most writers have a degree of privilege, so you can bring in what you want to bring in and leave out what you want to bring out. Sure, I'm an analog human. You know, I was born long before the digital revolution so that I can't change that. And I know I'm an analog human. And yet I love what is happening out there in the sense of connectivity. Although we've seen trolling and hate speech on the internet, fake news. Also the demolition of our democracies. That doesn't mean that the tools themselves are malign. It means the way we're using them is childish mainly.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That will change. I think tech as a tool is really useful to us, and I'm not in any sense somebody who wants to go back in time and say, oh, the world was better.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because at the minute, all tech is a tool. It's not superior to us. We use it, even though algorithms are number crunching is far in excess of what humans can manage. Those things are still our tools. They're not calling the ship.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm glad you brought up Bradbury and Wells. You know, I was always thinking and reading at the time Philip K. Dick, really the flash fictions, aren't they? The short stories in particular. And as you say, dystopian visions. I don't see that it has to be that way. Right.”
2020-01-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeanette Winterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT