we are, she argues, at a turning point in our story as a species. Until the Industrial Revolution, change was all about "Mother Nature and the slow process of becoming", but then we "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, and "an evolutionary leap. That's what this is. Al is much more than a tool." Given this, a certain understanding of the irreducibly human - our feelings, our imaginations, our centuries of study of who we are, what we have done - must be - central to how well or badly things may go. But in failing to distribute its gains fairly, the Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of unprecedented wealth for the few and unprecedented levels of misery for the many - a state of affairs many predict is not only already echoed but will be dwarfed by the fallout from Al: a permanent underclass, entire continents left behind and starved of current sources of income. Not to mention the environmental impact of datacentres at a time when the world can least afford it. The problem is not AI, she insists, but us. "There is no inevitable dystopia." If things go wrong, it will be because of "old-fashioned thinking laid over this brand-new reality". 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 Al 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. She does know that, "Yes, we are on track to mess up this chance to fundamentally change our relationship to the world of work" - but that's because our masters are using out-of-date, not-fit-for-purpose economic models" she adds, it's important to remember that "the machines don't have a limbic system.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, so we've got the neural network, our rational processing self, and we've got the limbic system, which is much older and that's the fight-flight-freeze, and where all our feelings come from." Perhaps detaching from the limbic is the next stage, she says, and it definitely 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." "What we know about humans is they love monopolies," says Winterson, "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," as told in Joanna Kavenna's brilliant 2019 dystopian novel Zed. "That is a real possibility," she says. "And that's why we need people who are sort of free-range humans, who can think." `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`