Humanmaxxing: Jeanette Winterson (5/10)

Humanmaxxing: Jeanette Winterson (5/10)

Doom is too easy

Sari Azout

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Sublime

Sep 05, 2026

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Welcome to Humanmaxxing, an interview series on thriving in the age of machines.

New episodes drop weekly. You can follow along on

Substack

,

YouTube

,

Spotify

, and

Apple Podcasts

.

We partnered with

Granola

(the

actually discrete

meeting notetaker we LOVE and use every day) to sponsor this series and record each conversation. You can chat directly with Jeanette’s conversation

here

, pull out takeaways, and follow whatever thread interests you. If you want to try Granola unlimited, use code

SUBLIME

to get 3 months free

here

.

~

PSA:

Early bird pricing for

Code for Creatives x Sublime

ends Sep 10th, when the price jumps from $1,200 to $1,500.

The six week live course with Alex Dobrenko—the host of this interview series—will equip you with the confidence and skills to make the products, tools, and websites you wish existed (like

this

very cool retro website he made with deets on the course). Plus, I’ll be teaching one of the weeks on how to make things that feel good and YOU.

Come with something you’re wanting to build, or just the curiosity of what becomes possible when you give yourself permission to explore. So far, we’ve curated a wonderfully eclectic group, including a brand studio owner, an NYU humanities professor, a SF based yoga teacher, a CPG founder, a senior product manager at a tech startup, a philanthropist, and an interior designer. Learn more and apply using the link below.

Apply to Code for Creatives x Sublime

jeanette winterson

published her first novel at 24 and has since written more than 26 books, with her work frequently published in the Guardian, Observer, and New York Times. Her most recent work has explored our relationship with technology — the boundaries between humans and machines, the consequences of transhumanism, and the moral, societal, and spiritual implications of AI.

I first discovered Jeanette through her

keynote at the Sana AI Summit

, where she drew a fascinating parallel between our ancient ideas of God and the emergence of AI as a new form of non-biological intelligence.

In a conversation dominated by doom on one side and tech bro productivity maximalism on the other, Jeanette is one of the few humanist voices I’ve discovered offering a compelling vision for a techno future.

Thanks

Lauren Crichton

for introducing us!

You can watch full conversation on

YouTube

and listen on

Spotify

or

Apple Podcasts

. Plus, thanks to

Granola

, you can chat with the conversation

here

. Committed wordcels can find the highly edited transcript below.

Enjoy!

Sari

ALEX DOBRENKO:

You seem pretty chill about AI.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:

I believe that we are at a cusp on the human journey, that this is survival or nosedive. But I’m optimistic because humans are the success story. We’ve always pulled out of situations. We’ve always managed to come back from the brink, with just enough ingenuity, enough common sense, enough compassion, enough humanity. I agree with Ezra Klein that this could bring about incredible abundance. This could be a point where we get rid of all of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs and all the things that nobody wants to do, and that we’ve got another chance at the strengths of the industrial revolution.

I’ve been thinking to myself: hey, if you invent a power loom, you don’t need to put seven people out of work and take all the money. You could share the profits. Or it could disenfranchise most of us and just leave this wifi-enabled Noah’s Ark to float off with the rich tech bros while the rest of us are all drowning. Like that movie

Elysium

. We’ll all be eating cat food, and they’ll be living on some gorgeous planet where everything works.

But I don’t want to go too far down the dystopia road. If you ride a motorbike, you know this saying. Where your head goes, your ass follows. You’ve got to keep balanced. The human superpower is our imagination. Nothing that’s been built, nothing that’s been invented, no ideology, no technology, starts anywhere except in the mind. So I’m thinking to myself, if we get all this, this, this Doomsday Terminator stuff all the time, that’s where we’ll go.

If you ride a motorbike, you know this saying. Where your head goes, your ass follows. You’ve got to keep balanced. The human superpower is our imagination. Nothing that’s been built, nothing that’s been invented, no ideology, no technology, starts anywhere except in the mind.

AD:

I know you had a rough childhood. Where does your optimism come from?

JW:

Well I survived, and I thrived! I left home at 16. I was living in the back of a car, I was living in a tent. Got myself a scholarship to Oxford, pushed on from there. The thing is, there was no hope for me in those days. I was just a kid who had nothing going for her, I was adopted. And it was reading that made me realize, at that point, that I could change the story, because I am the story.

And it was that understanding, not to get too lost in the literal. We’re so lost in the literal these days. Visionaries have always worked this way, whether it’s Gandhi, Jesus or Marx, it doesn’t matter who it is, whether you’re on their side or not. Somebody comes along and they see it differently and then they sell that story to millions of others. And that’s where we are now with the AI revolution. We’ve got to get a good story and sell it.

It was reading that made me realize that I could change the story, because I am the story.

AD:

So how do we get to a better vision of the future? What’s the story?

JW:

I really think it’s going to take everybody, every kind of startup, every person who’s working in tech, everybody who has a more inclusive vision of where we could go. People don’t know much about the smaller people in the frame who are trying to do things differently and trying to build a better future. They don’t really get much publicity. How can we be louder about that stuff? How can we recenter the conversation that we could do something that would help people? We have lost that conversation.

I was just in Barcelona and some kids asked me how I find meaning in my life. My answer was that you have to start by respecting yourself and then go on respecting yourself every single day. Not to look simply for the job you want to do, but for the values you need to live with yourself.

You have to start by respecting yourself and then go on respecting yourself every single day. Not to look simply for the job you want to do, but for the values you need to live with yourself.

There’s more to life than making money, than having power over people. Nobody in history’s come out happy with any of those outcomes. So what are we going to do so that you, whoever you are, rich or poor, from a good family, a poor family, how are we going to get some meaning into your life? And in schools, these would be good things to talk about.

AD:

What are your values?

JW:

I follow the very simple Buddhist value of doing no harm. Do my investments harm others? What about the food I eat? What about the clothes I wear? What about the work I’m doing? I always wanted to make a difference through my writing, because it’s what got me free. Which is why I’m always trying to offer people a route back into their own imaginative superpowers, so that they can see their way out of their own small situation, so that they can develop cognitive skills, language skills, imaginative skills that allow them to approach the world without fear, but without arrogance either.

Somebody’s always going to tell you a story. It could be your family, it could be your church, it could be your community, it could be something you believe about yourself. But is it your story? And I want to give people the chance to tell their own story, to take control of their own narrative.

AD:

Do you believe in God?

JW:

I don’t know. And I mean that. There might be a much bigger intelligence that we’ve called God through various points in history for very good reasons. I suspect this because we’re inventing God again with AI. When people start freaking out and say that you can’t have a relationship with something that’s not human, I’m thinking: dude. Have you been to the mosque? Have you been to the synagogue? Have you been to the cathedral? Yes, you can. It does not have to be human. So we need to forget that bit.

I’ll be thrilled when I come home and I have my little bot in the kitchen that says: Jeanette! And I’ll say hi, and they’ll say, how was your day? And I’ll say, not so good. People talk to fish in the fish tank. Everybody talks to their dog. It’s going to be nice. We’re going to be the cuddly ones, and then there’ll be AI, the stern taskmaster.

When people start freaking out and say that you can’t have a relationship with something that’s not human, I’m thinking: dude. Have you been to the mosque? Have you been to the synagogue? Have you been to the cathedral? Yes, you can. It does not have to be human. So we need to forget that bit.

AD:

And is that scary for you, or are you still pretty chill?

JW:

With the way I’ve been brought up, whether I like it or not, somewhere in me feels that it’s okay to have a big overarching deity. I used to have a girlfriend who was brought up in the outback. Put her near a tarantula or a snake, anywhere we went traveling, and she knew exactly what to do. She wasn’t frightened. She’d been brought up with deadly venomous snakes and insects. I was a gibbering wreck; she’s chopping tarantulas in half and picking up snakes by their tail and grabbing their heads and throwing them away. In that sense, no, I’m not scared, because I’ve been brought up with the idea of a deity being a good thing.

A lot of people who work in tech, the physicists, the mathematicians, a lot of them are really secular and haven’t thought through the God problem and all the ramifications. I do think that secularization and the lack of the wider cultural understanding about God is partly what’s pushing the doom-laden talk and the fear. But doom is too easy.

AD:

Well, I’ll tell you, when one of my kids gets hurt, I suddenly believe in God and I start praying.

JW:

It’s the placebo effect, right? Is it that humans know that the only way they can harness the massive power of their mind is by projecting it onto a superpower god? Or is it that somehow we know that there is some intelligence there, that the universe is alive and does hear us? I mean, this is why it would be great to stay around. We’re going to get some really cool answers. We’re going to find things out. AI will help us approach these mysteries differently.

Thanks again to

Granola

for making this series possible. You can chat with the full conversation

here

and use code SUBLIME to get 3 months free

here

.

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