Machines Like Me: From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Lessons

McEwan is frustratingly uneven - for every success like The Child in Time or Atonement you get a stinker like Solar. This one veers close to the failed comedy of Solar for a couple of scenes (McEwan does wit far better than comedy), but otherwise escapes, and the discussions around the function and development of AI are entertaining. (It helps that in this universe there's an elderly Alan Turing to deliver some sage pronouncements.)The plot twists I found signalled well in advance, and the characters, as so often with McEwan, were fairly unlikeable while being deftly sketched. This is realistic, of course, but there are insufficient saving graces to make you want to follow their progresses.

I think one of the things that makes science fiction very good is the fact that it could very nearly be real. The fact that we already have e-helpers in the form of Siri and others, makes this story almost believable.A young man, not terribly keen on working, inherits some money and buys Adam, a very lifelike robot. He and his girlfriend spend time programming various traits into this man. Of course a love-triangle develops.As the book progresses Adam gets more and more 'human' and I got to really empathise with him.This book makes you really think about lifelike robots and how far one would like them to become 'human'.The ending is very emotional.Fascinating.

Ian McEwan is tackling a difficult subject - our attitude to artificial intelligence - namely very human looking robots. He does so with thoughtfulness. This book raises many questions about moral dilemmas, about the madness inherent in being human, about how a perfected human being would operate. It's interesting. It does go on a bit. Not sure if it's necessary to have the rather long lectures within the story. Still, I like Ian McEwan and I like that he tackles contemporary and difficult subjects.

I absolutely adored reading this book.The plot takes place in the 80s on a world where Alan Turing survived. Since Turing was a genius in all things science and technology, the world is in a far more advanced state in the 80s. Surpassing the technology that we know now in 2020.The main characters are Charlie, Meridith, and Adam. Adam is a artificial intelligence fueld being. So real in fact that most people don't even know he isnt human.The story is a tale of how Adam comes into these peoples lives, how he helps them grow, in maturity as well as financially, all to bring it crashing to their inevitable ruin.The author beautifully recreates history around the story. Stock markets, presidents, leaders in government. The rise of rights for the artificial intelligence beings. Truly a great story and one wild creation. Great read

I only give this book 2 stars because of the cute kid, and the interesting premise. Otherwise, it’s a monotonous, emotionless whine by the narrator. Yes indeed, we may well be confused about who is the android.This book seriously misses the mark.

McKewan is the connummate storyteller. I enjoyed this book immensely but was somewhat bewildered at the end, when I thought we were still in Thatcher's Britain (or were we not?), when cellphones suddenly came into the picture and the characters began texting. I'm pretty sure no such thing existed in those days. Still, it was a good read and i'll buy his next book.

i'm highly interested in things like robots, androids, all things about Spacex, etc. I was looking for quality fiction that presented a case of human and robot connection. Overall, I found the book "Machines Like Me" shallow and disappointing.What I did find very interesting was the notion of buying a robot then programming it's personality to your particular taste. However my pleasurable reading quickly expired with the authors time switch technique and the improbable meeting with Alan Turing.

For the most part I found this work boring. There was clever, innovative thought behind it but I found the various side plots did not connect well. Overall I was glad to reach the end.

I read this in two days. It is a captivating novel, with brilliant characterisation, including of Adam - an android who develops a mind of his own whilst living with with his purchaser Charlie, and his girlfriend Miranda. Adam is a fast learner. combing the internet in his head all night in search of new information, understanding and poetry. The big problem; he lacks understanding of the nuances of human morality ...All of this is set in alternative UK of the 1980s in which Britain loses the Falklands war and where mobile phones, the internet, Sat Nav are all already common place. Almost a fifth of cars are autonomous vehicles - and AI entities, androids like Adam, are are just beginning to appear.So much for the story, and i can write no more without spoilers, but makes for compulsive reading- but it is the depth of the writing which is astonishing and which makes this such a fascinating novel. There are parallels with the real world of today - splits in the Labour Party, a disintegrating Conservative party, protests in the streets, debate about Britain's place in Europe and in the world - but it is the moral questions this book poses which have left me thinking even after I have finished the book - the nature of sentience, the role of truth and of loyalty, the random twists and turns of fate on our lives and life in general - there is so much in these 300 odd pages.I strongly recommend you read this excellent book for yourself

Literary writers trying their hand science fiction often causes problems. for SF aficionados, it annoys, as often the literary writer is unaware of the tropes of the genre, or that a particular topic may have been extremely well explored in a novel of ideas, that was published in the genre and not recognised in the classical literary world. for the non-SF aficionado reader, the sudden importation of tics and tells of the SF world may also rankle, although this has become much less so in recent years as so many of the "great and good" of the aforesaid classic world of letters have decided to write books which at least tackle the world's recent challenges by first reading a batch of the appropriate science (whether the dismal science of economics, to write about the crash of 2008, or the warm science of anthropology, to write about gender in alternative histories of the future (you know who I'm talking about, right? not Ursula le Guin:), or else the science of computers, to create stories about the impact of apparently intelligent machines on robots - oops, sorry, got that the wrong way round - we humans aren't apparently intelligent machines, that's the robots, that is :-)Hence to Ian McEwan's latest, Machines Like Me, an everyday tale of rape, suicide, and possibly, murder. Fairly everyday stuff from this author you might think....however, in this case, he's decided to write a book set in an alternative present, with an alternative recent past, which, crucially, allows him the luxury of having Alan Turing as a living character who has pursued many of the directions hinted at in his work, so that lifelike robots are now (almost) an every day, if somewhat expensive reality in the world. McEwan acknowledges Hodges fabulous biography of Turing as a source for background, rightly, as the character is pretty much what you'd get from that work, or else from the play, Breaking the Code (though less so from the film, Imitation Game). Turing is also supported by a cadre of interesting loosely fictionalised people, to render the progress on AI tech more plausible - most notably, the real life Demis Hassabis (DeepMind, also acknowledged as a source at the end of the book) is relocated about 25 years earlier in time than his real self, to help Turing create the more important foreground character of (would you believe it, as the Cockney's have it, would you Adam and Eve) Adam, an apparently functional synthetic human (don't get me started on why McEwan seems unaware of the fabulous exploration of this topic in the wonderful Swedish, then Brit TV series, Humans). The key "real" humans in this fictional work are Charlie, a mid-30s man of somewhat relative moral virtue, and his friend, Miranda, a student of very dull eras of history. I assume she's called Miranda as a sly reference to Shakespeare's character from the Tempest, who uttered the words "Oh Brave New World, that has such people in it", on first seeing men. And of course, the source of the title of Aldous Huxley's classic literary SF dystopic vision.Here, much of the dystopic vision is of the political/economic kind, and is set in a kind of mash up between 1970s/1980s Britain, with a few (c.f. Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick's alt.history) with some amusing takes on Thatcher, if we'd (spoiler alert)... or what if Tony Benn..... or what about that IRA bomb in Brighton... oh, ok , I won't spoil those bits, as they make up some of the novel's interesting bits, in the sense that, for this reader at least, they created a very interesting alternative exploration of why the UK is where it is today, 3 years after the Brexit referendum.As for the foreground tale of two humans and a machine like them, I thought that Charlie and Miranda were underwritten, and Adam was overwritten. i thought that the exploration of ideas like "what is consciousness" was about ok, but did not bring anything new to the table - the tension between Phenomenology and the Turing test (for what it is worth) for intelligence, and notions of EQ, was covered far more effectively 5 decades ago in "Do Androids Dream" by the aforesaid Philip K DIck (who had actually studied philosophy and could write character and plot). I wanted to know more about Miranda's cranky dad (another non spoiler - there's a funny reflection on dementia and human mis-judgement that involves him and Charlie and Adam).The ending did not bring a sense of an ending for me, rather left various plot line, moral questions, and unknown unknowns, still unknown.Still, McEwan sure can write, so I'd recommend this book as a decent read, though below his best. He really should get out more, and so should I.

I did something I’ve never done before: I read this book then immediately read it again. McEwan arguably ranks among the top 5 writers of contemporary English literary novels, & Machines Like Me can only enhance his reputation. It is a glorious book - clever, timely, tender, compelling - reflecting on the moral paradoxes inherent in our fascination with AI & its application to humanoids: helpers, companions - Machines Like Us.The narrator, a rather impulsive dilettante, uses a windfall to purchase one of the newest, most sophisticated of these beings, perfected to the point of being indistinguishable from ‘real’ humans. He does this on the basis of an interest in electronics & anthropology, but a weakness for gadgets & simple curiosity are factors too. As its owner he expects to be in total control of Adam, but as the narrative develops it seems that Adam might have a mind of his own.McEwan cleverly imagines an alternative history or reality where there is much that we recognise from our own lives, but many events, personalities, timelines & destinies are shuffled around. In other words he creates an imagined but perfectly feasible & self contained world, thus demonstrating how the nature of things is arbitrary & conditional .It would be too limiting to describe the book as sci-fi; it is about what it is to be human, what is the nature of mind & the relation between reason & emotion. The theme is aptly summarised by its epigraph:But remember, please, the Law by which we liveWe are not built to comprehend a lie...*I should perhaps add, there is nothing difficult or preachy about this book. It is remarkable, human & humane, full of interesting insights but most of all a jolly good read.*Rudyard KiplingThe Secret of the Machines

Literary writer has a go at science fiction but gets a bit lost.If you create an alternative world you have to work quite hard at its internal consistency if you don't want to jar people. The idea that the first result of a programme to develop humanlike robots is to sell a small batch of them to random members of the public and then not even have a monitoring programme beyond a six-month service visit is just very naive. It allows the author to explore interesting stuff but it would have been quite possible to do that exploration, and maybe make it richer and more interesting, if McEwan had been willing to do a bit more work to set things up. That's what good science fiction writers do, it's not easy work but it's one of the keys to setting up the social laboratory.And the 'normal world' aspects are equally jarring. There is a point where the characters are heavily engaged in activity that will have serious legal consequences for them, obvious to the reader, but they just don't notice. A bit like someone going to rob a bank while making their identity highly visible so they are bound to be caught and imprisoned. Of course you could have a fictional situation where that was the point, but the characters appear normally intelligent, with a lot of relevant experience, ample time to think things through and no intention to get into trouble.Again it's just laziness, instead of putting some effort into constructing a consistent plot the author seems to have ignored the contradictions that will have the reader tearing their hair out. All through the book there are large and small things that feel dashed off sloppily because the writer couldn't be bothered to construct something more coherent.It's the first time I've read McEwan and I'm disappointed. Maybe the highly respected literary reviewers who have said such glowing things about this book are happy to ignore the discrepancies, maybe they are equally naive about technology and the criminal law. I'll have to read something else by him I guess but it feels like a classical musician playing jazz, they can do all the notes but they don't really get the point.

I loved the exploration of living with a synthetic human and the imagined 1980s British political landscape.However, I found the first person, reported speech, lengthy descriptions and self analysis tiring.I couldn’t put the story down and read it more avidly than anything I have read for years, but in the end found it ultimately disappointing.