Books: Machines Like Me

I couldn’t help feeling that, since Atonement and Saturday, Ian McEwan had rather taken his foot off the pedal — On Chesil Beach seemed slight, Nutshell gimmicky and overworked, and even The Children Act was on the thin side. His new, gripping, beautifully written and constructed, disturbing, and provocative novel is none of those things, and is a thrilling read.

The action takes place in Britain in the 1980s, but not the 1980s that we knew. The technological revolution has already arrived. Most cars are autonomous, high-speed trains run from London to Glasgow in 75 minutes, and computer technology is very sophisticated. Much of this has to do with the fact that Alan Turing is still alive and is a national hero and, with barely a nod to Francis Crick, has an institute named after him near King’s Cross. Mrs Thatcher called a disastrous snap general election after losing the Falklands War, and almost 3000 British lives, and Tony Benn is the leader of the Labour Party. Oh, and the Beatles have re-formed.

Charlie Friend lives alone in a seedy flat in Clapham: his horizons are not exactly broad and he gets by playing the stock markets on his laptop. Miranda, who is beautiful, has a dark secret, and is doing a PhD on the Corn Laws, lives in the flat above. Charlie is in love with Miranda and they develop a close but asymmetrical relationship.

Almost unaccountably, Charlie blows the last £86 000 of an inheritance on a handsome humanoid called Adam, one of only 25 in the world, who possesses phenomenal powers of reasoning, analysis, and memory, and looks, speaks, and behaves exactly like a human being. He goes for walks alone and chats to the proprietor of the corner shop about Rabindranath Tagore. He has other characteristics that lead to what Charlie thinks must be the first cyber-cuckolding on record. We are already in subversive McEwan territory.

The developing plot throws up questions, insights, and paradoxes, about consciousness, love and affection, morality, free will, justice, nature and nurture, and humanity. Some of these may not be new, and the machine–human interface has been the subject of science fiction for a long time, but because McEwan cleverly creates powerful echoes between what was happening in his alternative 1980s and the problems that we face today, and which will challenge us in the near future, the narrative rarely seems dated, and occasionally is remarkably prescient.

I don’t know who advised McEwan on the technical content of this book, but it does seem to include a very serious health warning about the potentially adverse effects of machine learning, the dangerously seductive attraction of very high speed ‘reasoning’, the development of understanding and insight that may be more apparent than real, and the chilling conclusions that hyper-rationalism can come to are brilliantly described.

• © British Journal of General Practice 2019