Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Tucked into the corners of these erudite essays are multitudes of fascinating facts and thoughtful what-if speculations.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. Transhumanism will be the new mixed race." In “Hot for a Bot,” the author discusses the history of automata sex dolls and AI–enhanced love dolls: “Men do seem to think that a woman can be manmade, perhaps because a woman has been a commodity, a chattel, a possession, an object, for most of history.” In “Fuck the Binary,” she posits the intriguing question of whether “AI could be a portal into a value-free gender and race experience.” Chronicling the contributions women have made in the so-called “hard” sciences-“Don’t you love the language?”-Winterson bemoans the fact that, today, the “number of women taking computing-science degrees is falling.” Despite all the incumbent dangers AI might hold, the author is optimistic and hopeful: “I am sure that our future as Homo sapiens is a merged future with the AI we are creating. She hopscotches with aplomb from vacuum tubes and transistors to the internet, Wi-Fi, issues of privacy, smartphones, AGI (artificial general intelligence), and robots, along with the Gnostics, Buddhism, and cryonics. Winterson is excellent at compressing a great deal of technical, scientific, philosophical, literary, and religious material into digestible, witty, and provocative essays.
The author begins by going back to key historical figures from her novel-Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace, both of whom, “in their different ways…saw coming.” Mary had her electric-powered literary life-form and Ada her dazzling, pre-computer mathematical skills. These essays probe the past, present, and future of computer technology. Hot on the heels of her recent, critically acclaimed novel, Frankissstein, the prolific Winterson offers 12 bites of the apple known as artificial intelligence, a key topic in the novel. A vigorous, sharp mind probes the world of computer science and more.
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