REVIEW - 'MACHINES LIKE ME' BY IAN MCEWAN

McEwan creates an eerie narrative of a state-of-the-art robot named Adam, and his interactions with his minder Charlie and his girlfriend Miranda. The complex interactions of this strange ménage-à-trois form the core of the plot than spawn connections to the role of chance in history, artificial intelligence, the neglected Renaissance essayist William Cornwallis, the demands of the Japanese three-line poetic form, Haiku, and the P versus NP problem of computer science.

            My thoughts in the early chapters went to the possible outcome of the humanoid's relationship with Charlie, who had spent his mother's inheritance on the purchase of Adam. Would it be a repeat of Stanley Kubrick's movie, 2001 - AI conquerors man?

            The emerging subject in the novel becomes 'moral choice' where McEwan offers his readers a story that compels them to wonder not only about science and technological progress, but also about their own lives. The author uses the brilliance of Alan Turing to champion the advent of humanoids, provoking chilling possibilities for the future.

            McEwan claims that the function of literature, the novel is a privileged space for the exploration of human reality and human beings. His position becomes even clearer when Adam utters his prediction on the future of literature in a posthuman world: “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.

            'Machines Like Me', creepy, laced with dark humour, provocative, was an enjoyable read of speculative fiction that will stay with me for a long time.