Great Beginnings Book Club discussion

This month’s book proved to be a little divisive! (I say a little because it seems that most people were in agreement; they said the book was disappointing, dull, or unengaging. As one of the few people who actually liked the book, I suppose that I ought to say that Machines Like Me was a little divisive and very underwhelming. But! Judging by some of its literary reviews, critics found the novel to be quite good. Perhaps McEwan’s venture into alternate history and love-struck robots is destined to be polarizing.)

And while it is obvious in retrospect that this book will disappoint some readers, that does not mean discussions about it are doomed to be disappointing, dull, or unengaging. To the contrary, we have often found that the best discussions follow after divisive books. It is much more fun to have the opportunity to articulate why a book is intriguing or “one of the worst things [you] have ever read” and then to set those justifications against each other. The fact that Machines Like Me contains some extremely timely explorations of the role that computers and AI play in society is an added inducement to a good discussion. (For such a supposedly divisive book, it was able to assemble a surprising amount of consensus that, despite all advances and plausible near future advances, computers are still too rigid and unaccountable to be the judge of final appeal on, well, really any social, legal, or political question.) Even group members put off by some unsympathetic main characters can find something interesting in McEwan’s thought’s about economies disrupted by automation and the ethics of self-driving cars. In a moment of serendipity, PBS recently aired a documentary about Amazon and its technology – from voice and facial recognition to cloud computing. The world around us provides plenty to engage with here.

On a side note, McEwan caused a bit of a stir when he appeared to distance his work from the science fiction genre. “There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you. If a machine seems like a human or you can’t tell the difference, then you’d jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities and rights and all the rest.” Authors have often been sensitive about genre perceptions, especially because science fiction had a reputation for much of the 20th century as low-prestige and unserious. Although genre labels may be now more a matter of marketing than of substance, they still exert influence over the expectations of readers and the range of possibility open for authors to explore. To McEwan’s credit, he later acknowledged the science fiction roots of Machines Like Me and the authors whose work helped to shape it. Given the tension between expectations for science fiction and other literary genres and how McEwan seems to deliberately trying to strike a new balance, it is possible that part of the disappointment that some readers this month felt was genre dissonance. Try to keep that tension in mind when considering the following reading questions.



Let’s talk about it.

1. Machines Like Me is not simply a story about robots; it is a work of alternate history. Although most of the alterations a largely kept to background details – Britain loses the Falklands War, the Beatles get back together and give a reunion tour, the AIDS epidemic is cured after a short-lived period of intense international cooperation, Joseph Heller’s novel is entitled Catch-18, Jimmy Carter wins reelection in 1980 – they serve to highlight the alien and disquieting nature of a society where apparently conscious robots are emerging. It is the events that do not change, however – the United Kingdom still leaves the EU, the Brighton Hotel Bombing still occurs, economic and political upheaval follow in the wake of automation, and the general oddity that every major political figure somehow retained their real-world ideology and priorities even in a world with talking robots – that allows McEwan to insert some sly commentary on current political controversies. Alternate history is a difficult balancing act. If things are too similar, people won’t notice the difference, making the whole effort self-indulgent. If things are too different, then they lose the shared experiences that ground the work and lend it plausibility.

When they are being theoretical, historians spend a lot of time talking about contingency, about the possibility that there is nothing special or inevitable about past events. If current outcomes depend upon prior circumstances – and those prior conditions depend upon still earlier conditions – then a single alteration in the chain of causality will produce radical differences. (There are clear parallels to chaos theory’s butterfly effect here.) Part of what makes counterfactual history so compelling is that so much of history depends upon the free choices of humans. If we truly have free will, could we have chosen differently? What changes would those differences make? To what extent are we responsible, each in our small way, for the current conditions of the world?

McEwan’s alternate history seems almost superfluous. Aside from the very obvious technological advances due to the survival of Alan Turing, it doesn’t seem to impact the story that much. Would the novel work better if it was simply set several decades in the future? What do you think McEwan gained by setting the narrative in the 1980s?

“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.” (Chapter Three, pg. 70)



2. There are a lot of ethical and philosophical dilemmas in the novel, most of which stem from Adam’s ambiguous nature as a (possibly?) conscious robot. Is having sex with a robot a betrayal of one’s partner or no different than using a sex toy? Should people have the power to own and unilaterally switch off conscious robots? Is suicide in the face of adverse circumstances ever acceptable? Is it right to frame a person for a crime in order to punish them for an actual crime from which they had escaped justice? Should we ever steal money in order to donate to worthy charities (and, barring that, what is an acceptable standard of living before we become selfish for not donating more to charity)? Who is responsible for the actions of a robot or, for that matter, a child – themselves or the people who raised them?

How do dilemmas like this influence that narrative? Do you think that they are organic to the plot or merely calculated for McEwan to ask questions that interest him?

“Throughout, he remained impassive, blinking at irregular intervals, holding my gaze. When I finished, nothing changed for half a minute and I began to think I had gone too fast, or spoken gibberish. Suddenly he came to life (to life!), looked down at his feet, then turned and walked a few paces away. He turned again to look at me, drew breath to speak, changed his mind. A hand went up to stroke his chin. What a performance. Perfect. I was ready to give him my devoted attention.

His tone was of the sweetest, most reasonable kind. “We’re in love with the same woman. We can talk about it in a civilized manner, as you just have. Which convinces me that we’re passed the point in our friendship when one of us has the power to suspend the consciousness of the other.”” (Chapter Five, pg. 141)



3. All right, the big one. Alan Turing begins his seminal 1950s paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence with the rather bold “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” His way to answer that question was the “imitation game,” now popularized as the Turing Test. He concluded that if a machine could successfully fool a human interpreter that it was also human, then it must be deemed capable of thinking.

Is Adam conscious? How do we decided that another human is conscious?

And, if Adam can think in the same way that humans can, what is the point of putting that consciousness in a robot body shaped like a human?

““You weren’t simply smashing up your own toy, like a spoiled child. You didn’t just negate an important argument for the rule of law. You tried to destroy a life. He was sentient. He had a self. How it’s produced, wet neurons, microprocessors, DNA networks, it doesn’t matter. Do you think we’re alone with our special gift? Ask any dog owner. This was a good mind, Mr. Friend, better than yours or mind, I suspect. Here was a conscious existence and you did your best to wipe it out. I rather think I despise you for that. If it was down to me – ”” (Chapter Ten, pp. 329-30)



4. Adam, especially given the rate of inflation mentioned in the novel, was quite expensive, between $500,000 and $2,000,000 in today’s terms. (Although that does seem rather cheap for one of 25 of the supposedly first conscious robots.) What are robots for? It is easy to understand why we might want a robot to harvest crops, mine minerals, sew clothing, or perform any number of difficult, laborious, or tedious tasks. But do we want robots as friends, conversationalists, or artists? People often reveal extremely personal and intimate details through their Google searches. They are, in effect, telling a computer their secrets. Is this because people perceive that a computer is better equipped to keep their secrets and not judge them?

What are we hoping that conscious robots will do for us?

“It was religious yearning granted hope, it was the holy grail of science. Our ambitions ran high and low – for a creation myth made real, for a monstrous act of self-love. As soon as it was feasible, we had no choice but to follow our desires and hang the consequences. In loftiest terms, we aimed to escape our mortality, confront or event replace the Godhead with a perfect self. More practically, we intended to devise an improved, more modern version of ourselves and exult in the joy of invention, the thrill of mastery. In the autumn of the twentieth century, it came about at last, the first step towards the fulfillment of an ancient dream, the beginning of the long lesson we would tech ourselves that however complicated we were, however faulty and difficult to describe in even our simplest actions and modes of being, we could be imitated and bettered.” (Chapter One, pg. 1)



As always, feel free to answer any, all, or bring up your own questions.

You know, sometimes, you just post a long document only to immediately realize that you forgot something else! My apologies.

The link to the PBS documentary on Amazon is here.