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Loading... Maskiner som jag : och människor som ni (original 2019; edition 2019)by Ian McEwan, Meta Ottosson
Work InformationMachines Like Me by Ian McEwan (2019)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Sometimes, it feels like Ian McEwan is just using his characters as vessels to trumpet his knowledge. How else could you explain a protagonist who thinks about the evolution of medicine and algorithms in his free time? Adam also talked a lot about quantum mechanics, which was hard to understand. The story was saved by its weighty themes of justice, revenge, and morals. Charlie owns Adam but is the money earned by the latter also Charlie's? Charlie and Miranda wanted to hide the latter's crime but Adam didn't let them. Can a machine be more ethical than humans? What if Alan Turing had lived and contributed to technology advances that enabled the internet, mobile phones, and artificial intelligence to flourish in the 1980s? Protagonist Charlie Friend uses an inheritance to buy an artificial human named Adam. He asks Miranda, his upstairs neighbor and prospective girlfriend, to help program Adam by selecting a number of options that determine his personality. Miranda is harboring a secret, which Adam discerns, and in revealing this secret, Adam unleashes unintended consequences. The twenty-five existing androids start experiencing depression and self-destructive tendencies. The narrative combines elements of love, betrayal, revenge, justice, and jealousy. Adam must interpret human actions and motivations and respond to them. This response is not always what humans consider appropriate and forms a major part of the dramatic tension. There are a number of simultaneous plotlines and intellectual discussions. It is filled with literary references. I enjoyed the humor that Adam introduces with his haikus. I found it a creative mix of alternate history, science fiction, love triangle, and social commentary. It's London in 1982, although it's not quite the 1982 many of us remember. Jimmy Carter is in the White House, Margaret Thatcher is in serious trouble after the Falklands task force was routed, and Alan Turing is still alive with a knighthood having decided thirty years earlier to brazen out his conviction for gross indecency by taking a year in Wandsworth nick instead of the offered alternative of chemical castration. As a result he returned to his studies in the field of artificial intelligence and worked with Crick and Watson on neural networks. Meanwhile Charlie, a feckless young man who scrapes a meagre living playing the stock markets and hopes to seduce his young upstairs neighbour Miranda, who has a dark secret, blows a legacy on Adam, a first edition android. Things don't go as smoothly as Charlie and Miranda would like of course. Adam is very clever but can't come to terms with the devious human mind. A novel or a meditation on the moral issues raised by artificial intelligence? I probably need to let this one pickle a while in my head before I finally decide. As a novel it's an easy read but it's no Atonement. As moral philosophy it raises a lot of tricky questions that need to be addressed. Most of the alternative reality stuff is fun, and brings not only insights into the political and social conflicts of the period but also the conflicts nearer to our own time.
McEwan thinks his literary novel about A.I. is superior to a genre that surpassed him long ago.... If McEwan had read some of the genre’s best treatments of this theme, Machines Like Me might have been a better book....the novel is larded with long, tedious passages of potted history.... he could start this lazy, flimsy novel over, only this time with the humility to learn from those who have boldly gone before There is a Cassandra tendency in McEwan’s fiction. His domestic dramas routinely play out against a backdrop of threatened doom. Since the portent-laden meditation on war and terrorism, Saturday, in 2005, he has also turned his gimlet attention to climate change in Solar. The opening lines of that novel – “He was running out of time. Everyone was, it was the general condition…” – have sometimes sounded like his fiction’s statement of intent. The New Yorker called his work “the art of unease”. It was ... therefore only a matter of time before he got around to the looming ethical anxieties of artificial intelligence.... McEwan has an abiding faith that novels are the best place to examine such ethical dilemmas, though he has little time for conventional science fiction. Belongs to Publisher SeriesGallimard, Folio (6965) AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong, and clever--a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma. Ian McEwan's subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I am a McEwan fan from way back, and for me, he can do no wrong. Robots Like Me is no exception.
This dystopian novel set in the last half of the 20th century touches on the themes of love, loyalty, betrayal, and morality. And all against an alt-reality where Turning did not take estrogen, the the JFK assassination failed, and Tony Blair was assassinated.
Every now and again a real reality pops in. The Thatcher Poll Tax, the Brexit-like attitude to the EU. The rise of neural networks in computer science.
But the alt-reality is a mere background to the fault]y manage a trio of two humans and a robot., that are the essence of the novel, in the questions they pose about the meaning of truth, integrity, and human bonding.
The only criticism I have is about what I see as a flaw in the logic of the storyline, I can’t give this away as it would be a spoiler - but for those who have already read it, I found Adam’s first actions that broke Asimov’s first law of robotics, not only implausible, but not addressed (as they should have been) as the plot unfolded. Looking back at the novel these actions were not explained, or even used in any way other than to allow the plot to unfold without stretching credibility just a little too far.
Other than that, it is brilliant.
I read it on audible. I recommend the text version. The reader has a whiny tone to his voice, and when there is a three way conversation involving a human male, a human female and a male robot, it is almost incomprehensible - the three major characters sound almost all the same - a bunch of petulant wingers. ( )