It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you. Believe me, these lines express no triumph...Only regret.
Machines Like Me is eminently readable – I was never bored or annoyed or impatient (which happens too often with too many books) – but even though Ian McEwan can undeniably string together words in satisfying arrangements, this book felt ultimately pointless. Set in an alternate recent past, McEwan investigates the dawn of sentient AI, and as current and as interesting as that concept may be to us today, he doesn't really add anything new to the imagined whatifs of this scenario. Bottom line: Like a pleasant walk in the park in which nothing of much interest happens; it's still always nice to have a walk in the park.
Set in the 1980s, this is a world in which JFK was never assassinated, Carter beat Reagan in his second presidential election, Argentina won the war for the Falkland Islands, and perhaps most importantly, Alan Turing chose a jail term over chemical castration to deal with his “crime” of homosexuality, and his time locked up gave him the mental space to solve the math problems that would lead to the development of AI that would pass his own Turing Test. I suppose it was interesting (and morally satisfying) to have Turing alive and present in this novel, and McEwan must have had some fun imagining a world in which Heller wrote Catch-18 and Tolstoy penned All's Well That Ends Well, but honestly, this alternate past wasn't integral to the plot. I guess it gave McEwan space to philosophise:
The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise. True of the smallest and largest concerns. How easy to conjure worlds in which my toenail had not turned against me; in which I was rich, living north of the Thames after one of my schemes had succeeded; in which Shakespeare had died in childhood and no one missed him, and the United States had taken the decision to drop on a Japanese city the atomic bomb they had tested to perfection; or in which the Falklands Task Force had not set off, or had returned victorious and the country was not in mourning; in which Adam was an assemblage far off in the future; or in which 66 million years ago the earth had turned for another few minutes before the meteor struck, so missing the sun-blotting, fine-grained gypsum sand of the Yucatan, allowing the dinosaurs to live on and deny future space to the mammals, clever apes included.But even the philosophy wasn't really fresh – if a character starts a mental ramble with “I was hardly the first to think of it, but...”, then what's the point of including it?
I was hardly the first to think it, but one could see the history of human self-regard as a series of demotions tending to extinction. Once we sat enthroned at the centre of the universe, with sun and planets, the entire observable world, turning around us in an ageless dance of worship. Then, in defiance of the priests, heartless astronomy reduced us to an orbiting planet around the sun, just one among other rocks. But still we stood apart, brilliantly unique, appointed by the creator to be lords of everything that lived. But then biology confirmed that we were at one with the rest, sharing common ancestry with bacteria, pansies, trout and sheep. In the early twentieth century came deeper exile into darkness when the immensity of the universe was revealed and even the sun became one among billions in our galaxy, among billions of galaxies. Finally, in consciousness, our last redoubt, we were probably correct to believe that we had more of it than any creature on earth. But the mind that had once rebelled against the gods was about to dethrone itself by way of its own fabulous reach. In the compressed version, we would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension. What need then of us?As for the plot itself, other than some tangents that did little to illuminate a larger theme – the foster child named Mark string that I didn't find credible, the court proceedings that made me uncomfortable, the political upheaval in Britain that sees Thatcher ousted (is it the point that Brexit was always inevitable at our current level of technology, no matter the particular history that got us [t]here?) – the larger plot could have been a script for an episode of Black Mirror: A man who considers himself to be an early adopter of technology uses an inheritance to buy one of the world's first truly sentient AI humanoids. And as both the man, Charlie, and the android, Adam, fall in love with the beautiful upstairs neighbour, a moral dilemma exposes what it means to love, to be human, to behave with integrity. Truly: from Pinocchio to Commander Data, I feel like I've already been exposed to this level of what it means to be a real boy. As Adam has a constant connection with the Internet and can explore everything ever written and stored somewhere, he spends a lot of time philosophising about the meaning of life – and several times Charlie tells him that his thinking is sophomoric and unoriginal (so again, why include it?), but I was intrigued by Adam's eventual declaration that the haiku will eventually be the only legitimate form of literature:
Nearly everything I've read in the world's literature describes varieties of human failure – of understanding, of reason, of wisdom, of proper sympathies. Failures of cognition, honesty, kindness, self-awareness; superb depictions of murder, cruelty, greed, stupidity, self-delusion, above all, profound misunderstanding of others. Of course, goodness is on show too, and heroism, grace, wisdom, truth. Out of this rich tangle have come literary traditions, flourishing like wildflowers in Darwin's famous hedgerow. Novels ripe with tension, concealment, and violence as well as moments of love and perfect formal resolution. But when the marriage of men and women to machines is complete, this literature will be redundant because we'll understand each other too well. We'll inhabit a community of minds to which we have immediate access. Connectivity will be such that individual nodes of the subjective will merge into an ocean of thought, of which our Internet is the crude precursor. As we come to inhabit each other's minds, we'll be incapable of deceit. Our narratives will no longer record endless misunderstanding. Our literature will lose their unwholesome nourishment. The lapidary haiku, the still, clear perception and celebration of things as they are, will be the only necessary form. I'm sure we'll treasure the literature of the past, even as it horrifies us. We'll look back and marvel at how well the people of long ago depicted their own shortcomings, how they wove brilliant, even optimistic fables out of their conflicts and monstrous inadequacies with mutual incomprehension.So, I liked that, and I liked the writing overall, but Machines Like Me just felt a bit unnecessary in the end. However, a pleasant walk in the park isn't strictly necessary either; no regrets.
