'What tech is doing now is what religion has always wanted' Jeanette Winterson at home in east London. 'What tech is doing now is what religion has always wanted' Jeanette Winterson at home in east London. 'There is no inevitable dystopia': Jeanette Winterson on AI and the future of humanity The author believes we are at a turning point as a species - and even in the shadow of big tech it's up to us how we want to proceed'I am a storyteller by trade," writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes, an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking series of essays in which she considered just how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. "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." She had already been thinking about our possible futures for at least 15 years - her 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, for instance, imagined a post-climate catastrophe world populated by robots and humans who never age, while 12 Bytes was preceded by Frankisstein: A Love Story, which alternates a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor's travels among present-day cryogenecists and AI-enabled robots. When we meet, Winterson is just back from China, where, she tells me, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a fictionalised account of her childhood, has sold more than a million copies in the past six years; more than 200,000 mostly young women tried to come to see her speak. She thinks this is because, in a world of long work hours and looming AI-engendered precarity, this fictionalised account of her own escape from an entrapped childhood gives readers permission to imagine a different future for themselves. She has since written 13 novels for adults, as well as nonfiction, short stories, children's books and screenplays. Now she wants to persuade the production company Goalhanger to give her a podcast. "I want to do one called The Rest is Human," she says, sitting at a bare wooden table in her home, a Georgian set of rooms above a shop - which she also owns - in Spitalfields, east London. "To see what we retain for ourselves in this absolute scramble to outsource everything we thought we were." Winterson: 'We've got a market that doesn't really know what education is for.' Because 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.

Don't leave AI to tech bros and oligarchs, UK's AI minister says To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Britain cannot let aritificial intelligence be ruled by tech bros and oligarchs, the AI minister has said. Kanishka Narayan told the BBC's Political Thinking podcast that dealing with the technology requires not only regulation, but building capability and capacity in the state too. He compared AI to the Victorian-era Industrial Revolution, but said the country needed to transition better than it did back then. His comments were recorded the day before Barclays banking group announced it was cutting 5,000 jobs in an AI-led efficiency drive.

Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical warns AI threatens humanity, but history shows technological progress lifts living standards. Why the pope and Bernie Sanders may be wrong about AI.

What Pope Leo XIV's First Encyclical Says About the Power of AI In, the Pope decries the concentration of technological power in a few global players. Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah shakes hands with Pope Leo XIV ahead of the presentation of the first encyclical. An algorithm decides what we see, another filters what we read, and still others enter into the processes that govern work, information, and collective choices. But the text is not conceived as an exclusively technological reflection. Pope Leo XIV places the issue of AI within the tradition of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and directly invokes--while updating it--the of Pope Leo XIII (published on May 15, 1891) in the year of its 135th anniversary.

The pope's encyclical will address'the protection of the human person in the age of AI', the Vatican says In the first major text of his papacy, Pope Leo will address the rapid rise of artificial intelligence . The Chicago-born pontiff will present the document, known as an encyclical, at the Vatican next week during an event attended by Christopher Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic - a US-based AI firm that has clashed with Donald Trump's administration. The encyclical will address "the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence", the Vatican said on Monday. In a break from tradition, Leo, who was elected pontiff in May last year, will launch the document during a public presentation on 25 May. He will be joined by lay speaker Olah of Anthropic, which is in the middle of a high-profile lawsuit with the Trump administration over the ethics of AI, as well as theologians Anna Rowlands and Léocadie Lushombo.

Florida students boo graduation speaker who called AI'next Industrial Revolution' Real estate executive got an unexpected earful when she spoke of'living in a time of profound change' Though college graduations usually consist of a speaker giving advice to students, one recent ceremony featured students giving the speaker their opinions - loudly. The University of Central Florida's 2026 graduating class booed as a real estate development executive spoke about how "the rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution" and about "living in a time of profound change". US university's commencement speaker reveals he will pay off students' final-year loans The crowd of students was so loud that Gloria Caulfield paused, turned away from the podium and threw her hands up in the air. As the crowd calmed down, Caulfield proceeded. "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives."

The widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely to displace people from jobs in a similar way seen during the Industrial Revolution, the governor of the Bank of England has said. Andrew Bailey said the UK needed to have the training, education, [and] skills in place so workers could shift into jobs that use AI. He told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme people looking for a job would find securing employment a lot easier if they had such skills. However, he warned that there was an issue with younger, inexperienced professionals finding it difficult to secure entry-level roles due to AI. We do have to think about, what is it doing to the pipeline of people?

For years, Paul Kingsnorth was one of the most visible members of the green movement. Then he walked away from it. Now he wants us to walk away from everything else. For Kingsnorth, the Industrial Revolution marked the point of no return, the moment when we decided to play gods and turn our backs on the Earth. In 2014, Paul Kingsnorth was sunk in doubt. He was forty-one and had been on the green movement's front lines since the nineteen-nineties--working for Greenpeace and EarthAction, chaining himself to a bridge, getting tear-gassed outside a G-8 summit.

A terrifying societal collapse worthy of Hollywood can never be entirely ruled out. But according to one former Google executive, it may come a lot sooner than we expected. Mo Gawdat, a tech entrepreneur and author who spent 11 years at Google, has given a bleak warning about the near-future of society. Speaking with The Diary of a CEO podcast, Mr Gawdat said we'll be living in a dystopia in just two years' time. Sounding worthy of George Orwell's novel '1984', the dystopia will last up to 15 years, the expert said.

The head of Google’s DeepMind says artificial intelligence could usher in an era of ‘incredible productivity’ and ‘radical abundance’. But who will it benefit? And why does he wish the tech giants had moved more slowly?