Machines Like Me

My expectations were not high about this book for several reasons.

First, I found Ian McEwan's writing to be of inconsistent quality. His Atonement was brilliant, he clearly botched Amsterdam towards the end, I was quite indifferent towards Sweet Tooth. He has an engaging writing style, he can pull off surprises and set emotional traps for his readers. McEwan is not afraid of variety in terms of subject matter as he touches on many relevant contemporary issues. Yet his books are primarily British centric and I find his moralizing can get a bit tiring.

Second, I dabbled in machine learning myself a bit, including decision trees, deep neural networks, reinforcement learning. Let me tell you, some remarkable results were achieved in the show more field recently. Let me also tell you, we are still as far from creating a true artificial mind as we were when Asimov came up with his three laws for robots or even when Karel Čapec invented the word in the first place. So, we are still in the range of science fiction here, meaning there is more of fiction than science. It does not mean that imminent breakthrough in artificial intelligence is impossible but it would still require something like proving 'P=NP', which most mathematicians today will tell you cannot be true.

Third, I really had my doubts that a combination of Ian McEwan and machine learning would yield any interesting results. And this is where I was wrong.

This book is set in a parallel world that is remarkably similar to ours. One of the thrills of reading Machines Like Me is discovering differences both small and big between these two worlds. Some are obvious like the outcome of the Falklands war, no Hiroshima, Carter beating Reagan, Alan Turing rejecting chemical castration, living and working productively into his seventies while achieving key breakthroughs in computer science along the way. Other differences are less evident, more nuanced, like a conspicuous absence of Russia from international politics, like an extension of the 60s movement way further into another decade or two. These delightful finds are scattered throughout the book and will test the erudition and the knowledge of history of readers.

As might be expected from McEwan, questions of ethics and morals are prominent. The value of truth, the problem of symmetric justice, no goals that can justify any means, questions of redistribution of wealth as a concept vs personal wealth- all of these are quite beautifully laid out. They underlie the plot, McEwan punishes his characters for the wrong moral choices they make. Is there a redemption, is atonement possible? The discovery for me was interesting as some of the issues raised overlapped with my own past mistakes. Possibly this personal connection, similar errors of judgement in assignment of values with those of the protagonist make this book more meaningful for me. Will these questions resonate as much with other readers, or will they find this moral stance annoying?

Finally, the sentient machines, suitably named as Eves and Adams - strong and vulnerable, capable and powerless, realizing the value of consciousness and its self destructive potential. Are they dangerous for us humans, whom they can quickly leave behind in terms of intellectual abilities? How their ethics will shape out? Are we ultimately doomed when we start playing the role of gods? Or maybe the machines can help us understand our own weaknesses and failures? Can they deal with the realization that in Vigil's words goes like this: 'sunt lacrimae rerum' - there are tears in the nature of things? Can they shed those tears? show less

This took me a while to start reading, because I made the mistake of looking up all the negative reviews first. And yes, this is a bad sci-fi novel, and a jumbled work of fiction in general, but honestly, the worst part for me was the narrator, Charlie Friend (or Humbert Humbert, as I started calling him, creepy old nonce that he is). The story is fairly easy to get through.

Set, randomly, in an alternate version of the 1980s, presumably so that the author can safely rant about politics while also dropping in cliched technological advances like artificial intelligence, a nonentity called Charlie, living in a flat in London beneath a younger nonentity called Miranda on whom he has a crush, buys a 'synthetic human' called Adam. And - show more that's the story, really. Adam is the best character in the book. Charlie is the type of bland middle-aged man - although he's only 32 - who thinks that drinking wine makes him sophisticated and calls shagging the girl in the flat upstairs 'making love', because 'getting his end away' would make him sound shallow. Miranda, the emotionally stunted student who is ten years Charlie's junior yet somehow - author insert alert! - falls in love with him anyway, is supposed to be some sort of sympathetic womanly enigma - she has a secret! - but the only depth of character she gains is a nasty streak of vindictiveness. I wasn't convinced that Charlie and Miranda were in love, or that their needs mattered more than Adam's. And the ridiculous subplots of Miranda's secret and the little boy that she wants to adopt just made me like the 'humans' even less. Perhaps that's the point - I hope so, Mr McEwan!

Anyway, Adam. One of a batch of twenty five androids named Adam and Eve - that's the level of originality we're dealing with - created by an Alan Turing who doesn't kill himself but lives into old age, this Adam has the misfortune to be purchased by Charlie and programmed by both Charlie and Miranda, yet he's still awesome. Intelligent, perceptive, poetic (gotta love those haikus), and not about to take any shit from his 'owner' - when Charlie makes a habit of switching Adam off, Adam breaks Charlie's wrist and threatens him: 'I mean it when I say how sorry I am I broke a bit of you last night. I promise it will never happen again. But the next time you reach for my kill switch, I'm more than happy to remove your arm entirely, at the ball and socket joint'. I laughed, I have to admit. Charlie and Miranda's lives are so small and pathetic, and Adam is so brilliant, that I kind of wanted him to follow through on his threat and worse. But when Adam's implacable logic serves Miranda the justice she's so fond of meting out to others, the two bottom feeders go after Adam again!

The plot is rambling and cliched, padded with political rants and what McEwan must have thought was his clever reinvention of the 80s - the Falklands War and a lot of lives are lost, the prime minister is killed at Brighton, etc - and the narrator is so boring that Miranda's father thinks he's the machine (another laugh), but I enjoyed reading about Adam and how his 'brothers and sisters' are so depressed by humanity that they are systematically killing themselves. I couldn't have cared less about Miranda, and didn't believe for a second that a 23 year old student would want to adopt a random child, even less that her application would be seriously considered. I think the author is of the view that all women make natural mothers, and some latent maternal instinct will kick in when faced with a grubby toddler who has the unfortunate name of Mark. But then, he also seems to think that Charlie Friend would attract said 23 year old just because they live in the same building, whereas she would be more likely to laugh in his face and then move out. Although their rationale that 'the end justifies the means' is bitter evidence that they deserve each other.

Intriguing and infuriating - could have been far better, if told from Adam's perspective! show less

1982 - eine Welt, in der Alan Turing noch lebt und die Gesellschaft mit seiner Kreativität und Intelligenz um viele Erfindungen bereichert bzw. ihnen zum Durchbruch verholfen hat wie beispielsweise autonome Fahrzeuge oder lebensechte Androiden. Einen solchen 'Adam' kauft sich der 32jährige Charlie ohne zu ahnen, wie sehr sich Adam in sein Leben drängen wird.
Eine tolle Thematik, die angesichts der Entwicklung von künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) hochaktuell ist. Ausgangspunkt ist eine Liebesgeschichte, in die der Autor geschickt die Fragen nach Moral, Ethik, Gefühlen und sonstige relevante Problematiken für den Bereich der KI hineinpackt. Zwar hat auch McEwan keine endgültigen Antworten zu bieten (das wäre auch zu viel erwartet), show more aber er zeigt in beinahe unterhaltender Art und Weise die Schwierigkeiten auf, die sich aus dem Zusammenleben zwischen Mensch und Androiden ergeben können. Doch damit nicht genug: Aus der Liebesgeschichte heraus entwickelt sich eine Rachegeschichte, die die Frage nach Recht und Wahrheit stellt, nach Gerechtigkeit und Gesetz, was sich durch die 'Augen' einer KI völlig anders darstellt als für einen Menschen.
Fast beiläufig, dennoch stets präsent, sind die Zeitläufte in denen dieses Buch spielt. Zeitläufte, die durch die Veränderung einer 'Kleinigkeit' wie beispielsweise dem Weiterleben von Alan Turing, völlig anders ablaufen als wir sie erlebt haben. Zwar entspricht Vieles dem, was wir kennen und teilweise selbst erlebt bzw. mitbekommen haben. Aber Anderes, auch Wesentliches, hat sich in eine völlig andere Richtung entwickelt. Ein Gedankenexperiment, das deutlich macht, wie wenig es bedarf, dass das Leben eine gänzlich andere Bahn nimmt.
Und damit sich auch wirklich niemand langweilt, gibt es noch kleine und größere Exkurse in die unterschiedlichsten Themengebiete: Medizin, IT, Kunst ... Ja, der Autor verfügt über ein profundes Wissen, aus dem er für dieses Buch aus dem Vollen schöpft. Und besitzt zudem die Fähigkeit, kluge Sätze zu schreiben wie "Aber war das nicht Natur? Und zudem ein alter Hut? Männer, die Frauen für eine Naturgewalt hielten? Glich sie also eher einem kontraintuitiven euklidischen Beweis?"
So toll das Thema, so intelligent auch die Ausarbeitung - mir ist das insgesamt von Allem zu viel. Vielleicht bin ich auch nur nicht schlau genug. show less

As you’d expect from a master novelist, a finely balanced opening sentence flows to a well-written paragraph. Before you know it, you’ve been drawn in. It is England, in the “autumn” of the twentieth century. But we quickly realize that this will be alternate history. England has lost the Falkland War. And rather than hound Alan Turing to death, it has knighted him. And one more thing: the first artificial humans, “Adams” and “Eves,” come on the market.
Thanks to a timely inheritance, Charlie is one of the early-adaptors. He is the protagonist; the story is told through his eyes, even though — oddly — he is not the “me” of the title. An early interest in electronics is perhaps why he spends all he has on his Adam. show more Charlie has not made much of life so far. Despite having little ambition, he gets a law degree but is soon disbarred for his involvement in a tax scam. Now he spends his days in front of a computer in a two-room flat in run-down Clapham and has indifferent success as a day-trader.
The other flat in the house is occupied by Miranda, an attractive but secretive history student. Once delivered and fully-charged, Adam makes three. Working out the implications of having an electronic possession much more competent than its owner takes up much of the plot. That phrase “electronic possession” is, however, inadequate. Adam is self-aware and insists from the outset that he has feelings. Charlie assumes that Adam means he has been programmed to express appropriate responses. Still, Adam insists it is more than that. Soon, Charlie accepts him at his word.
An indication of Charlie’s dim imagination is that it takes him a while to tumble to the obvious, namely, that Adam is better-suited to day-trading than he. Charlie stakes him to a small nest-egg, then begins to enjoy a higher standard of living. There is a problem: Charlie had little inner-life before this. The addition of leisure doesn’t change that. He has time to read, attend concerts, go to museums. But he doesn’t. His life, rather than being fuller, is revealed in its emptiness.
Meanwhile, Adam spends his surplus processing capacity roaming the internet and ruminating on philosophy and Shakespeare. “My mind was empty, his was filling,” laments Charlie. This doesn’t prevent Adam, however, from having a similar feeling of unfulfillment: “but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it” (“it” being “self-aware existence”).
Despite his awareness of Adam’s prowess, Charlie feels superior. When Adam warns Charlie, who contemplates initiating an affair with Miranda, that she might be deceitful, Charlie assumes Adam’s wiring is faulty. Charlie never learns to appreciate the rigorous logic Adam applies to every situation. It doesn’t help that Adam lacks the social grace to soften his observations, such as: “From a certain point of view, the only solution to the problem of suffering would be the complete extinction of humankind.”
This is a tightly plotted book, little is in here that is extraneous. When McEwan describes Charlie’s switch from physics to anthropology at the university, this is not just an illustration of Charlie’s aimlessness. The author tells of Charlie learning that there is little that is absolute, universal right and wrong. Later, in the fate of Mariam, we have a specific instance: the Pakistani way of dealing with her dilemma, and the English.
In the end, Adam unmakes the future Charlie and Miranda plan. Despite his convincing insistence that he is alive, he is not, in the end, human. For him, these absolutes of right and wrong do exist.
Ultimately, Charlie asserts his ownership rights in a brutal way. The climax of the plot evokes earlier attitudes toward slaves. This had already been an undercurrent, as Charlie enjoyed leisure financed by the productivity of his possession.
Is McEwan a great novelist? His novels are masterful achievements. They tackle important moral and philosophical issues, play them out in dramatic plots. He researches his topics assiduously. When he references Bayesian logic, readers divide into three groups: those who immediately understand the reference, those who stop to look it up, and those (my group, I’ll admit) who pass over it and read on.
He writes well. Wording, syntax, pacing, chapter breaks all impeccable. But sometimes his attention to detail calls attention to the author, not the character in whose mouth he places those details. When Miranda tells of her childhood friend Mariam and her family, she describes the cooking of Sana, Mariam’s mother: “I ate curries for the first time and developed a taste for her home-made puddings, brightly-colored, extremely sweet laddu, anarsa and soan papdi.” I’m sure the names are correct, but I can’t imagine Miranda speaking that sentence. Even less can I see, smell, or taste those dishes.
Hmmm. Perfect writing skills combined, at times, with a lack of empathy for the reader. Perhaps McEwan’s novels are the product of a highly-advanced program. show less

Love, hate, anger, frustration, loneliness, fear, confusion, loss, morality the whole spectrum of human emotions. This is a book about a synthetic human (robot; android). About our world but with a different change of events. I would say science fiction or alternate history but after reading this very interesting book do not believe either of those would be a comfortable fit for this story.

One of the things I love about an Ian McEwan story YOU NEVER know where you are going but you will always receive a full dose of humanity and human emotions with people you really feel you could be in their shoes; you will look more carefully at yourself. Since I first read him through Atonement I have relished the journeys he takes us thought in show more this stories. Candidly sometimes they dont make sense until you start thinking about them and reflect on the characters and their feelings. BUT you simply cannot read any of his stories with a closed mind otherwise you miss the whole point McEwan is making.

When I stepped into this world did not have the least idea of what was going on or what to expect (kind of like life). Hey the main character just went out and spent a ton of money (that he could have used to make his life better) and purchased an synthetic human! Wow! And it was the 1980s! Ok. Well this could be interesting. And the journey was very interesting. What if Alan Turing was accepted by the UK for the genius he was and was allowed to contribute society, technology and science. What if AI was utilized early in the creation of artificial humans. What would happen if logical rational beings were cast loose in a society that lacked rationality and was fraught with irrational logic. What could a non human teach us about right and wrong about honesty and dishonesty. What vehicle does a author use to pull all of this and more into a story reflective of society and individuals. Well this is what McEwan has done with this novel. Nothing that I expected then again never knew what to expect.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story as it seemed ever turn of a page brought new revaluations and speculations to me. In many ways this is a mirror of humanity seen and spoken through a being of high intelligence and rationality that emotionally has no compass with which to navigate and digest the world around him.

The writing is outstanding, the characters are truly believable and their lives are like your life and mine. The dialogue is poignant yet it is actually conversational and the points are very subtle. Like all of his books this can be read a several levels and still be as effective and enjoyable.

Highly recommend this book and it has such an interesting story and prospective believe most anyone with an open mind or any level of curiosity will find a very intriguing. show less

Ooh, there's a lot going on here. At one level, this is a cautionary morality play about Artificial Intelligence, but it also continues McEwan's long interest in the welfare and development of the child (as explored most recently in The Children Act, but present in many of his earlier works too) and counter-factual histories (such as in Atonement or The Innocent). So in control of his craft is he, that he can pack all of these themes into a relatively short book.

Charlie is a former unsuccessful white collar criminal, living precariously from playing the markets, whilst lusting after Miranda, the much younger girl in the upstairs flat, who has secrets of her own. Having always had an interest in electronics and having written a book on show more Artificial Intelligence, when he inherits some money he spends it buying Adam, one of the first wave of manufactured humans. Adam has intelligence and the looks and motions to pass for human in the world, he is far more than a robot, he is a manufactured person. Whether or not he has a consciousness, or whether he has a mind as well as an intelligence, is the main narrative of the book.'

As a token of love to Miranda, Charlie allows her to set half the preferences for his "character"; in this way they become effectively Adam's co-parents, and their romantic relationship soon follows.

Adam is in most ways of course a child. He has the body of an adult - a good looking adult too, and the perfect lover, as Miranda wastes little time ascertaining, with an intelligence and learning capabilities any adult would envy. But he lacks a childhood, and the developmental experiences of a child in forming his character, and so is not an adult human. What do his expressions of love for Miranda, supported by juvenile haikkus, actually mean emotionally? By contrast, Charlie and Miranda find themselves (through a slightly convoluted plot device) becoming increasing responsible for Mark, an actual child, abandoned by his parents who they foster with an eye to later adoption. Mark expresses love for Miranda; so does Adam. So indeed does Charlie. In Charlie's tiny, cramped flat, this emotional quadrangle plays out. It would be a spoiler to go into much further detail, but Its to be hoped that Charlie and Miranda prove to be better parents to Mark, than they are to Adam

The main plot hangs around decisions that Adam makes that cause a crisis for Charlie, Miranda and Mark. These choices are in many ways logical, and unquestionably moral, but they would not be the same decisions a human would make. This,McEwan seems to suggest is the threat of non human intelligence. Not that it will in some way "take over" but that it will process information differently and come to different conclusions. This is the lesson of the AlphaGo victory over a human grandmaster at Go (an example discussed by the narrator). Whereas for a computer to win at Chess is essentially a maths problem (there are a limited number of moves possible at any stage - the computer just has to process which is best) to win at Go is an intelligence problem - the possible moves are limitless and intelligent strategy is required. AlphaGo taught itself the game, with no reference to human knowledge, and made moves that a human never would, that were none the less effective. In an AI driven future, McEwan suggests, this will happen all the time. "Correct" answers calculated in a completely different way

This is the morality question at the heart of the AI debate, and at the heart of the book. How can you teach a manufactured human to act as a human? Without a childhood.

As such this is a great narrative, more interesting that I probably, in the interests of not having spoilers, have made it sound.

Where I have some problems is with the timeline. Because this is not set in the future, or the present day, but in 1980s Britain. A slightly different 1980s Britain with not just mobile phones, and the Internet, but autonomous vehicles, and artificial intelligence. And I am not sure why this is necessary. I am even less sure why Alan Turing needs to be alive, and a character in the book as the father of Artificial Intelligence and much else (no reason why not I suppose - but why?). Other counterfactuals include Turing's collaboration with Demis Hassabis (who would have been a child in the 1980s), the reformation of The Beatles, Britain losing the Falklands War, Tony Benn as Prime Minister, and the list goes on. There is nothing wrong with such playfulness of course - and as McEwan himself rightly says on p64, "The present is the frailest of improbable constructs, any part of it, all of it, could have been different" . True enough - but it can be jarring, and I am not sure what structural purposes it serves

But if you can forget the occasional jarring, this is a very rewarding, and very well researched book. There's plenty to get out of it, because there's so much going on show less

Machines Like Me is Ian McEwan’s cautionary tale about a future that we just may not be ready for when it finally arrives. Synthetic humans (robots) are coming and they may be far smarter than we are when they get here. That may not sound like much of a problem, but what happens when the robots figure that out and become bored with us and our human limitations. Will they have the patience to put up with us or will they decide to take over for our own good?

McEwan ventures into the alternate history genre here to explore some of the what-ifs of the accelerating pace at which we are introducing artificial intelligence and robotics into our everyday world. The novel is set in a 1980s version of the world very different from the one show more recorded by the history books. Margaret Thatcher is driven from office in disgrace after badly losing the Falklands War; John Lennon is alive and well and the Beatles are still a band; and the Brighton hotel bombing this time does manage to kill a British prime minister (Thatcher’s successor). Oh, and Jimmy Carter wins a second term, John Kennedy survives his trip to Dallas, and novelist Joseph Heller finds fame with a book he titles Catch-18. You get the idea.

Charlie Friend, thirty-two years old and single, takes great pride in the fact that he doesn’t have to answer to any boss. Charlie lives alone in a London apartment where he sits in front of his computer all day long buying and selling stocks, earning just enough to cover his day-to-day needs. He is not the most ambitious guy in the world, and when he learns that what he earns from day-trading stocks is just below the wage of the average Londoner, Charlie is proud that he is doing that well without having to answer to anyone. He is not the type to worry much about his future. Now, though, Charlie is falling in love with Miranda, the student who lives in the flat above his - even though she does not seem to feel the same way about him. But after blowing all the money his recently deceased mother left him on one of the world’s first synthetic humans, Charlie may have just stumbled onto a way of binding Miranda to him. He lets her help him design the personality of Adam, the near-perfect physical specimen who will now be sharing Charlie’s flat.

Miranda, as it turns out, has secrets of her own, secrets that she can’t hide from someone like Adam who never sleeps and spends all of his spare time researching and learning about the world into which he has so suddenly been thrust. And after Adam warns Charlie that Miranda is not really who she seems to be, things begin to get tricky – especially after Adam declares his own love for Miranda.

Machines Like Me explores whether or not artificial intelligence can ever understand human emotions, motivations, and reasoning. Will it be possible for such a created consciousness to grow beyond the black and white rules it has initially been designed to follow? And if not, how will the inevitable conflict be resolved? What is to be done when our synthetic humans decide that they know what’s good for us better than we do. Which of us crosses the line first?

This quote (page 370 of the Large Print edition) should give all of us, researchers included, something to think about: “They couldn’t understand us, because we couldn’t understand ourselves. Their learning programs couldn’t accommodate us. If we didn’t know our own minds, how could we design theirs and expect them to be happy alongside us?”

Bottom Line: Machines Like Me is a bit frustrating at times because of the long, detailed digressions that McEwan strays into that do not always do much to advance the “discussion” of the potential conflict between artificial intelligence and human intelligence - but the patient reader will be well rewarded for his patience. I suppose that Machines Like Me will be most easily appreciated by science fiction and alternate reality fans, but it is a thought provoking philosophical novel as well. show less