Machines Like Me: A Novel

For me, McEwan is never a quick read but the writing is so good, modern literature, that it is well worth the moderate pace. So well written, and this time with a bit of science fiction - a very modern plot complete with social upheaval surrounding the protagonist. One of his best, I think.

Regardless of the country and time you’re from, you are sure to experience time-space cultural whiplash in McEwan’s latest novel. It’s both dystopian and alt-history. I know that dystopian is supposed to take place in the future, but, instead, McEwan’s convoluted setting this time is in the 1980s London. A very advanced 80s where Alan Turing survived, Tony Benn died (in the Brighton bombing!), JFK survived Dallas and Jimmy Carter beat Regan and was still president. The latter two factoids don’t impact the story but just give a little more alt-history for the context of the author’s setting. And, yes, robots that look like humans and have a bit of dramatic whimsy are the antagonists created by the protagonists.Charlie is a well-educated but aimless 30-something who earns his money in day trading—usually losing on schemes—has a bit of a shaky past with his law degree but is honestly open and vulnerable in a fetching way, to love. He decides he loves his roomie, a PhD candidate and history major, Miranda, the most enigmatic woman he’d ever met. He was likely attracted to her air of secrets. Charlie takes an inheritance and spends 89 thousand pounds on Adam, a robot who looks good enough to be human, and meant to be programmed by the owner to have whatever characteristics you decide to give him. Thus opens the whole theme of morality and technology and the intersection of the two. And what happens if you let your brand new love interest program half of Adam by herself?Don’t wait for me to tell you—go read the book! As always, McEwan never disappoints on prose, dry wit, a trough of sentimentality when it comes to romantic love, and the bittersweet shakedowns. It also addresses the limits of consciousness in AI. OK, and that topic has been explored by many other authors in thousands of books, so this wasn’t the reason I read it. I knew that McEwan’s story would be as much philosophy as conflict, and perhaps I’ve heard similar debates and ideas about robots before, but I wanted to observe how McEwan executed his characters and themes as well as story. He’s never a lazy writer, and his ambitions are typically within his sphere of confidence. It wasn’t my favorite McEwan—that spot goes to ATONEMENT. And at times I felt that the author was too restrained, and the liftoff was denied to us as readers.So, Charlie’s voice sounded a bit dour mixed with hopeful and careless optimism, especially when faced with Adam. Those two definitely had a friction that didn’t work. I think McEwan wanted us to explore how Charlie and Miranda could be a successful couple when they both programmed Adam (but didn’t share the characteristics they programmed into Adam). As the reader, we didn’t know any more than those two—even less, because Miranda’s choices aren’t transparent.Is Adam actually a combination of the traits they entered, or did he have his own consciousness arising from the two? And, if he didn’t have his own consciousness, what is the difference between having your own consciousness and simulating it? I like how McEwan provokes the reader to speculate, but then again I was a little disappointed in how it remains unanswerable. However, as always with his novels, there’s a bit of a jolt to the denouement—something that pushes you in a lane you weren’t ready for—at least, in one aspect. But there are other parts of the climax that are standard for this kind of novel about robots.This isn’t a spoiler, but I was especially impressed by Adam’s considered thoughts on vision and death. He compared it to our peripheral vision and awareness. “The odd thing is, there’s no boundary, no edge…There isn’t something, then nothing. What we have is the field of vision, and then beyond it less than nothing.” “So this is what death is like. The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness. Life, then death.” There are other nuggets like this that I enjoyed.My biggest complaint is that Adam didn’t really get under my skin, not as a robot or not as programmed—that, of course, should have been conveyed through the actions, reactions, and interactions between Miranda and Charlie. I thought that McEwan succeeded in somewhat closing the loop and leaving an opening to ponder, but as much as the characters were organically comprised, occasionally it felt stilted. The momentum was halting, and the alt history of the British politics didn’t tie in enough specifically—only in a general way of social sciences. But, I’m glad I read it and I was certainly engaged until the end. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be programmed by humans?

The novel is set in strange version of 1982 London, in which the Beatles are still together, England loses the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher is the outgoing PM but in which many of the technologies of the current and future eras simultaneously co-exist. The story centers on Charlie Friend, a 32 year old general failure who buys one of the first 25 extraordinarily advanced, human-like robots offered for sale (using the proceeds from the sale of his late mother’s house). Adam is the humanoid robot Charlie buys, and Matilda is Charlie’s 22 year old neighbor upstairs with whom he falls in love. The plot and sub-plots (some less plausible than others) are well-summarized in other reviews.It’s not one of my favorite McEwan novels (for those, see among others Atonement and Nutshell) but confirmed my belief that even a middling McEwan novel is much better-written and more clever, entertaining and thought-provoking than the large majority of other novels.

Parts of the book were very thought provoking about considering what makes us human, then it would trudge through politics, boring me to death. The story of Adam though, was interesting and his dawning into becoming a person.

Let me lead off by saying that the most disturbing thing about this novel is the dust jacket. This is a novel set in an alternate history where the first “synthetic humans” with artificial intelligence are available in the 1980’s. There are only a couple dozen of these “Adams & Eves” produced by the time of this novel and, if they looked as creepy as the synthetics pictured on the dust jacket, I would have sent mine back right away. However, that would’ve made for a pretty brief novel. Mr. McEwan digs in a bit deeper.Charlie, the slacker who is the protagonist of this novel, uses an inheritance to buy one of the first Adams. In love with Miranda, the girl living upstairs, he lets her provide half the initial conditions for Adam’s programming. Thinking Adam might be a “child” they would work on together, he becomes a romantic rival. Along the way, the trio become entangled with, not only their own issues, but those of an abandoned child, an aging father, and a criminal who may or may not have wrongly been sent to prison.In some ways, Machines Like Me is McEwan’s best novel since his triumphs with Atonement and On Chesil Beach. Though novels like Saturday, Solar, and Sweet Tooth have excellent passages, they also have serious flaws that ruin the unity of the novels. This novel, on the other hand, works well all the way through and it has some interesting meditations on what it means to be human, but it never reaches the heights that even his flawed novels achieve in places. This one is all very one note.One of the major problems with this one is the alternate 1980’s setting. Other than giving McEwan a chance to offer some commentary on some past people like Alan Turing and Margaret Thatcher and past events like the Falkland Island invasion, it doesn’t really work. It does not feel convincing that AI could ever have been so far advanced by the eighties. It mainly feels like it gave Mr. McEwan a lazy way to have a setting he could use without putting in the real effort of world building.I will finish by saying that I think Mr. McEwan is one of our great living writers. I consider Atonement to be one of the great novels and there are a number of his works that I hold in the top rank. This one is good, but I would not place it in the top rank.

This review was written by my wife. I find it deeply perceptive. It's in the form of a dialogue with various statements made throughout this very stimulating novel.P 139.-140Mc Ewan questions if biology gives a special status to human, because we are bound by the same physical laws… "The same elements, forces, energy fields, for both are the seeding ground of consciousness in whatever form it takes, and that it means little to say that the robot is not fully alive."Me: Is this seeding ground of consciousness bound by the same physical laws, the only thing required to be alive and conscious? This is the main unresolved existential question. P 330:"He (the robot) was sentient. He had a self. How it's produced, wet neurons, microprocessors, DNA networks, it doesn’t matter. Here was a conscious existence."Me: A sentient robot would be possible if sentience did not depend of the initial material from which it is produced. Contrary to robots, humans are born already with sentience and emotionally react to their discomfort.Humans learn through an accumulation of sensitive experiences, while robots learn through billions of alphabetical, numeral and pictural bits of data. Can that lead to the same results? For that it would require a common interface. Electromagnetism? Our state of consciousness is determined by frequencies of EM vibrations moving inside our bodies . We can see, thanks to the frequencies of colors. Each sound of a word or each colour bears its own particular spectral information..An undiscovered energy? Particles are points of excitations of interconnected quantum fields. But what is the source of this fundamental dynamic aspect of the universe? P156"Consciousness can arise from an arrangement of matter."Me: To exist consciousness requires more than an arrangement of matter. If not, a corpse would be conscious. Without vital energy, no consciousness is possible. P192"Life, as language is an open system. It requires external information."Me: It is true that life and language, being both an open system, requires external information, but there is a significant difference between life and language.He is right in saying (p193) : "There’s one particular form of intelligence that all the Adam-and-Eve robots know is superior to theirs. This form is highly adaptable and inventive, able to negotiate novel situations and landscapes with perfect ease and theories about them with instinctive brilliance. I am talking about the mind of a child before it’s tasked with facts and practicalities and goals. The Adams and Eves have little grasp of the idea of play- the child’s vital mode of exploration." P 324"I think that the A and Es were ill equipped to understand human decision-making, the way our principles are wrapped ii the force field of our emotions. Our peculiar biases, our self-delusion and all the other well-charted peculiar biases, and all the other well-charted defects of our cognition."Me: Not knowing emotions, robots cannot bring any subtilities and compassion to their knowledge. They work more like the equanimous indifference of the fundamental laws of nature, which does not take into account the sufferings and deaths of its individual living entities.But, as Stephen Hawkings so memorably asked: "What brings fire into the equation and makes a universe for them to describe?"

Em se tratando de um romance de Ian McEwan sempre se espera algo de muito especial; mas este livro deixa um pouco a desejar, é um tanto mecânico e previsível.

I bought that book after a review of the french edition in a famous radio show, where it had been warmly reviewed.The book is a mix of sci-fi and romantic, which describes the evolution of a love triangle in which one is a robot.Unforunately the writer is not good at either style. Anyone who knows a little about sci-fi sees immediately that he is not familiar with it, his dramatic mecanisms are terribly worn. His resources in the romantic genre are also very limited, with the usual mix of jealousy, anxiety and sideration.This is a demonstration that any writer cannot become a genre writer.The style is bland, completely lacking humour.The book is supposed to question the essence of existence; when the book is finished, the reader is none the wiser.This is one of these books that make me feel like I've wasted a few hours.

Up to date about technology and symbiosis with humans, but rewrite of history ..what might have been

This fiction seemed to me so relevant to our age and predicaments!