Questions about whether sophisticated machines could acquire consciousness and whether our species will eventually engineer our own superior replacement have consumed science fiction for a century. With the entry of the shorthand \u201cAI\u201d into common parlance, it seems inevitable that the same preoccupations would seize mainstream literary luminaries such as Ian McEwan.<\/p>\n
In an alternative 1982, artificial intelligence has advanced well beyond the primitive state of play in 2019. Out of idle curiosity, our footloose narrator Charlie uses an inheritance to buy one of the first synthetic humans, whose initial two models are named Adam and Eve. In love with his neighbour Miranda, Charlie pulls his would-be girlfriend close by involving her in the programming of his brand-new Adam\u2019s personality. Unwittingly, he thereby allows Miranda to design his perfect rival. Adam has been furnished with all the requisite equipment, and Charlie becomes the first man \u201cto be cuckolded by an artefact\u201d. He even imagines that he detects \u201cthe scent of warm electronics\u201d on Miranda\u2019s sheets. <\/p>\n
As Adam\u2019s machine learning goes into overdrive, the robot can\u2019t help but become a more compelling character than Charlie or his girlfriend. Yet after that single experimental coupling between Miranda and the boy toy, Adam\u2019s faithful promise to Charlie to never to have sex with Miranda again curtails the plot possibilities and reduces the complexity of the triangle. That complexity is instead furnished by a terrible dark secret in Miranda\u2019s past, whose nature owes a bit too much to the fashionable indignations of #MeToo. Miranda\u2019s fixating on a neglected little boy whom she yearns to mother also spanners their ersatz family, since we\u2019re told that the only mind more agile than a robot\u2019s is a child\u2019s, and Adam is jealous. Adam can memorise Shakespeare\u2019s canon, but he doesn\u2019t know how to play. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, AI\u2019s ubiquity is predictably causing mass unemployment. We learn that Adam\u2019s fellow synthetic humans cannot get their heads around the barbarity, self-destruction, illogic, and cruelty of their creators, and one by one the Adams and Eves are committing electronic suicide. We worry about our favourite character: the machine.<\/p>\n
A primary puzzle that powers the novel is why the author has set his story in a version of the 1980s that so closely resembles the present. We have smart phones. We have the internet. We have laptops, computer wristwatches, and self-driving cars. So why not opt for a standard near future, or the \u201cif this isn\u2019t today, then it could be tomorrow\u201d of Dave Eggers\u2019s The Circle<\/i>? <\/p>\n
The nature of the premise is implicitly revealed towards the end. In this parallel universe, the computing genius Alan Turing, also a character in the novel, was indeed arrested and convicted for \u201cgross indecency\u201d as a homosexual. Yet in the historical spinoff, Turing did not agree to undergo a grotesque, state-mandated course of hormone therapy to feminise his body and suppress his unholy urges. Instead, this Turing submitted to prison, where in solitude he achieved his greatest scientific breakthroughs. In our reality, Turing died (perhaps from suicide; perhaps not) in 1954, two years after his conviction. In McEwan\u2019s reality, Turing\u2019s survival sped up the development of AI, and of the digital technology on which we so famously rely, by 50 years and then some.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an elegant premise, which may spring from a deeply genuine authorial outrage over the shameful fate of one the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century, as opposed to the more fabricated-feeling outrage that produced Miranda\u2019s under-interesting backstory. Yet it\u2019s difficult to trace all of McEwan\u2019s counterfactual elements to Turing\u2019s survival. The sequence of events whereby Turing\u2019s post-1954 discoveries lead to Ronald Reagan\u2019s defeat in America\u2019s presidential race isn\u2019t obvious.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the conceit allows for all manner of mischievous historical invention, and \u2014 unlike Adam \u2014 McEwan knows how to play. He embraces Charlie\u2019s assertion, \u201cThe present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different.\u201d The Falklands invasion goes the other way, with British fatalities on the scale of 9\/11. The ignominious military loss leads to the early downfall of Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Benn becomes PM. (As for what happens to Benn, I won\u2019t ruin if for you.) Tiny details are piquant: Joseph Heller keeps his original, perplexingly flat title Catch-18<\/i>, while George Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/i> has been published under his working title The Last Man in Europe<\/i> (also the title of Dennis Glover\u2019s fictionalised Orwell biography). John Lennon was not assassinated, and the Beatles reunite.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m hard-pressed to explain what exactly is wrong with this novel, aside from the sense that it remains shy of what it might have been. The book\u2019s emotional centre is the relationship between man and machine. As Charlie tells Miranda, \u201cIf he looks and sounds and behaves like a person, then as far as I\u2019m concerned, that\u2019s what he is. I make the same assumption about you. About \u00a0 \u00a0 everybody. We all do.\u201d So although the plot manages to put Adam in an obligatory moral quandary, the long detours into Miranda\u2019s deep dark secret and her entrancement with the little boy feel like distractions, at the price of developing relations between the three principals. I wanted more robot, and less sexual-assault melodrama.<\/p>\n
That said, McEwan always writes impeccable sentences, and countless passages are precisely rendered and well observed. He neatly delineates humanity\u2019s remorseless self-demotion from centre of the universe to flotsam, which shares \u201ccommon ancestry with bacteria, pansies, trout, and sheep\u201d. Eventually \u201cwe would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension. What need then of us?\u201d In the world of AI, \u201cFactory settings\u201d are \u201ca contemporary synonym for fate\u201d. The scene in which Miranda\u2019s father mistakes Adam for his daughter\u2019s boyfriend and Charlie for the robot is charming. Machines Like Me<\/i> still generates narrative momentum, and the novel is fun to read. With work not quite up to their most acclaimed, it\u2019s always tempting to be extra hard on established authors, and it\u2019s too easy to overlook the fact that they still write better books than most people.<\/p>\n
Machines Like Me
\n<\/b>By Ian McEwan
\n<\/i>Jonathan Cape, 320pp, \u00a318.99<\/p>\n
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\n YARPP Thumbnails <\/p>\n<\/h3>\n