Stručni rad
Of Love, Stories and Superintelligence: Reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook in the Context of AI Development
Irma Krčan
Sažetak
The paper analyses Jeanette Winterson’s 2000 novel The PowerBook through the lens of AI development and human enhancement. Although Winterson seems to have shifted her focus to these issues only in her latest works, the 2019 novel Frankissstein and 2021 collection of essays 12 Bytes, it is argued that she addressed the complex relationship between humans and advanced technology already in The PowerBook, which centres on an anonymous e-writer typing stories for their lover on a laptop, offering freedom just for one night in a virtual world. Drawing on inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s work on the development of an advanced form of AI known as superintelligence, as well as on Winterson’s own views on the subject as articulated in 12 Bytes, the paper shows how The PowerBook uses narration to merge the human with the technological, the physical with the virtual, thus creating a story which in fact functions as a literary equivalent of superintelligence. This storylike superintelligence, as it is argued, is constructed as a very positive entity, one that turns out to be more capable of tolerance and love than biological humans. In this way, Winterson’s novel highlights the potential of approaching emerging AI technologies from a narrative, literary perspective.
Ključne riječi
Jeanette Winterson; The PowerBook; AI, stories; the Singularity
Hrčak ID:
317906
URI
Datum izdavanja:
17.5.2022.
Posjeta: 277 *