Machines Like Me (4*)

 

I'm not entirely sure what to make of Ian McEwan's take on artificial intelligence in an alternative historical context, although he sets up his fractured premise well.

"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."

In this novel's present, further computing discoveries by Alan Turing, who evades his mysterious death by cyanide poisoning, lead to the development of extraordinarily lifelike robots branded Adam and Eve and this telescoping assessment of man's diminishing place in the world:

"Once we sat enthroned at the center 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.  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?"

Typical of McEwan's twisted wit, his protagonist wishes he had gotten hold of an Eve but uses his Adam to ensnare his love interest in a relationship that's the least of his complications.  The Brits also have suffered a humiliating defeat in the Falklands War with casualties and a national response with strong parallels to America's 9/11.  In other words, the world is topsy turvy but recognizable; only human foibles have remained constant.

"Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighborhood to fix a sash window although a few had tried."

As much as I enjoy reading McEwan and his resurrection of a gay man who never has quite gotten his due, Machines Like Me suffers from a surfeit of thematic complexity.  Ray Bradbury's short stories stimulate thought-provoking goosebumps more succinctly although perhaps not quite so tragically.