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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?

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198. The Child in Time

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction

263 pages, published November 2, 1999

Reading Format:  E-Book

 

Summary

Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children’s books, must deal with the unthinkable when his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. The tragedy breaks up his marriage to Julie and leaves Stephen bereft.  Stephen and Julie struggle to deal with their horrific loss and grasp at an opportunity to continue to live.

 

Quotes 

“For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?”

 

“It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.”

 

“Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.”

 

“…children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.”

 

My Take

While I am a big fan of Ian McEwan (having enjoyed Atonement, The Children Act, Saturday, Amsterdam, Nutshell and Sweet Tooth), I am not a big fan of The Child in Time.  This book took me longer to finish than any other book that I have read during my quest.  I found it to be a slog and only finished it because I wanted the reading credit.  While there are many others who love this book, I suggest you try Atonement, Saturday or Nutshell for some great McEwan reading.

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167. Sweet Tooth

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

378 pages, published November 13, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome’s beauty, intelligence and staunch anti-Communism make her an ideal recruit for the UK’s intelligence service MI5.  Once there, Serena becomes a part of operation “Sweet Tooth,” the intelligence agency’s efforts to manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics align with those of the government.

Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, recruits Tom Haley, a promising young writer and they begin a tempestuous love affair.   With Serena fearing that Tom will discover her role in his financing, Sweet Tooth finishes with an unexpected twist.

 

Quotes 

“Love doesn’t grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.”

 

“There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.”

 

“By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.”

 

“Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.”

 

“My needs were simple.   I didn’t bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn’t mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say ‘Marry me’ by the end.”

 

“I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore…it’s in the stars!”

 

“And feeling clever, I’ve always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.”

 

“What I took to be the norm — taut, smooth, supple — was the transient special case of youth. To me, the old were a separate species, like sparrows or foxes.”

 

“Four or five years – nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.”

 

“Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.”

 

“Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted that all we had made was rotten, never thought to pose alternatives, never derived hope from friendship, love, free markets, industry, technology, trade, and all the arts and sciences.”

 

My Take

Having previously read Atonement, Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach, The Children Act, Saturday and Nutshell, I am a big fan of the brilliant English writer Ian McEwan.  While not his best work, Sweet Tooth is still a very interesting book with a compelling female lead character (Serena Frome) who delivers an inside look at the Cold War mentality in Britain during the early 1970’s.  McEwan also has a lot to say about the pleasures and purposes of reading (something I can relate to) and some fascinating asides on logical math problems.

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94. Nutshell

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

197 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Trudy and Claude are having an affair and plotting to murder Trudy’s husband who also happens to be Claude’s brother. However, there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month old resident of Trudy’s womb from whose vantage point the story is told.

 

Quotes

“It’s not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most – the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds – and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don’t even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out. Health desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I’m owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That’s the ride for me – the Wall of Life. I want my go. I want to become. Put another way, there’s a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start’s been made. I want to read to the end of My History of the Twenty-First Century. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31, 2099.”

 

“It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence.”

 

“You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta.”

 

“However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you’re inside them.”

 

“Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They’re not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they’ll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want.”

 

“Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose.”

 

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation.”

 

“When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.”

 

“In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime’s pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

So why not be an owl poet?”

 

“No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It’s an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.”

 

“There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.”

 

“A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.”

 

“In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She’ll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning.”

 

“I’ve heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness…Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self…God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.”

 

“I don’t know much yet about murder. Still, his scheme is more baker than butcher. Half-baked.”

 

“My immediate neighbourhood will not be palmy Norway – my first choice on account of its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead I’ll inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits restively for his crown. This will be my home, and it will do.”

My Take

Listening to Ian McEwan’s latest book Nutshell was a real treat (including the excellent voicework on the audio version by Rory Kinnear).  McEwan has always been one of my favorite writers (I especially enjoyed Atonement, The Children Act and Saturday), and Nutshell is a worthy addition to his canon. I particularly enjoyed the creative and original use of the fetal perspective to tell the story.  At first, you don’t think this is going to work or its going to get tiresome, but McEwan manages to pull it off and the device makes Nutshell a clever and memorable read.

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