Here is a quick description and cover image of book Machines Like Me written by Ian McEwan which was published in. ‘Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan’ is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.Brief Summary of Book: Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan His great hope is that by its existence “we might be shocked into doing something about ourselves”. The novel’s presiding Prospero is Turing himself, who observes that AI is fatally flawed because life is “an open system… full of tricks and feints and ambiguities”. Yet the book’s engagement with the big questions is its strength. Read more: Joanne Harris on returning to ‘Chocolat’, 20 years on: ‘I was told that no one wanted to read a book set in an unknown French village’ There is much fun to be had from a 1982 in which the Beatles are still recording and Tony Benn is prime minister – but why, in a world of driverless cars and Adam, did Britain lose the Falklands War, when military technology is always in advance of civilian? Machines Like Me is crammed with subversive ideas, as well as scenarios that don’t quite stack up. A Manichean machine-mind that can’t distinguish between a white lie and a harmful lie, or understand that revenge can sometimes be justified, is potentially lethal.

Added to this jeopardy is a robust thriller subplot, where a sexual assault in Miranda’s past brings forth a revenger from the criminal classes – a McEwan trope – and a four-year-old boy thrust on the care system who forces the couple to re-evaluate their attitude to parenthood.Īs the moral choices multiply, Charlie has to decide whether Adam is too dangerous to continue among his flesh-and-blood counterparts. Charlie’s one attempt results in a broken wrist.

What makes the book gripping is the rising sense of threat from Adam, who resists his owner when he tries to power him down. What makes the book gripping is the rising sense of threat from Adam, who resists his owner when he tries to power him down When Charlie makes contact with Turing, the Cartesian mysteries of mind-brain duality get thoroughly debated, threatening to tip the novel into a dry cerebral exercise. McEwan’s Turing has developed “machine consciousness” to its ultimate level, and is instrumental in putting Adam on the market.

The notion that a machine can fall in love opens up the intense philosophical debate that underpins the novel, most notably via the figure of Alan Turing, who is still alive, and a hero of Charlie’s. The complication is that Adam has fallen in love with Miranda. Adam is “not a sex toy”, but “capable of sex”, and acquits himself better than his human rival, causing Charlie to dismiss him as a “bipedal vibrator”. Read more: Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach unwittingly skewers our attitudes to sex todayīoth observations will prove significant, as once up and running, Charlie’s “ambulant laptop” becomes ferociously acquisitive not only of knowledge but emotional sophistication.

Machines like me by ian mcewan