534. Machines Like Me
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Ian McEwan
Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction
306 pages, published April 18, 2019
Reading Format: e-Book on Overdrive
Summary
Author Ian McEwan tells the story of a world where fully functional robots that closely resemble humans are introduced in an alternate reality 1980’s Britain. The UK has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing is alive.
In his early 30’s, Charlie finds himself unemployed and adrift when he comes into a small inheritance. He uses the money to purchase Adam, one of the first group of synthetic humans sold to the public. With the assistance of his neighbor Miranda, whom Charlie is in love with, Charlie co-designs Adam’s personality. Adam, who is beautiful, strong and clever, develops feelings for Miranda and the three protagonists are soon emeshed in a love triangle.
Quotes
“We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages.”
“As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.”
“Factory settings—a contemporary synonym for fate.”
“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.”
“We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.”
“I couldn’t motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn’t remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings walls and floors would contain me to the end. There was a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some crucial junction in their lives many years back – a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now there options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.”
“The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.”
“Have you any idea what it takes to catch a ball, or raise a cup to your lips, or make immediate sense of a word, a phrase or an ambiguous sentence? We didn’t, not at first. Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts — one dim light bulb.”
“It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you.”
“What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cognition-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set. The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”
“Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.”
“My prejudice was that any machine that could not tell you by its very functioning how it should be used was not worth its keep.”
“other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.”
“Europe was not simply a union that chiefly benefited large corporations. The history of the continental member states was vastly different from our own. They had suffered violent revolutions, invasions, occupations and dictatorships. They were therefore only too willing to submerge their identities in a common cause directed from Brussels. We, on the other hand, had lived unconquered for nearly a thousand years. Soon, we would live freely again.”
“A man newly in love knows what life is.”
“The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”
“My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.”
“The other day, Thomas reminded me of the famous Latin tag from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum – there are tears in the nature of things.”
“football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.”
“property, fed on each side by nationalistic stupidity. I summoned the Borges observation: two bald men fighting over a comb.”
“…I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf.”
“The academic movement known generally as ‘theory’ had taken social history ‘by storm’ – her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.”
My Take
Ian McEwan’s combination of an alternative history with fully realized robotic artificial intelligence make Machines Like Me a fascinating read. The plot itself is compelling in that we want to see what robotic Adam will do next and how he will interact with the human co-creators of his personality. However, the subtext of the book raises intriguing questions: what makes us human? Our actions or our inner selves? Could a machine understand the human heart and be capable of love?
