Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
There has been lots to do over the last couple of weeks, so I haven't read as much as I would like to. I am in the middle of a challenging book , Life A User's Manual: An Introduction by Georges Perec - more about this exciting book in a few days - and I have just finished Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me.
It's an intriguing story, It takes place in England in 1982, but in an alternate reality. Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles with her ideological rival Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing is still alive and achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Humanoid robots are a reality and Charlie a 32 years old man, who is drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, decides to spend his inheritance to buy one of the first 25 androids, a male called Adam.
Machines Like Me brings a lot of ideas and questions to the table. So many that it is easy to become overwhelmed. How do machines affect our behaviour and interaction? How do you teach machines to lie? Should they lie? Since they are sentient, do they have a shelf? Can an artificial form of life suffer? Should they have rights?
AnĀ intelligent and complex story about moral choices.