Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

Although I waited for a long time to read this book, I may confess this is by far my last favorite books by Ian McEwan. For my intellectual development, Ian McEwan played an important role in developing my critical reading skills. Many years ago, together with a bookish friend I used to have, we spent hours reading on Xerox copies the last McEwan´s novel, challenges both our literary and English language knowledge. I used to work with miserable people a miserable work and those literary exchanges were the only reasons I was going to work then.

Machines Like Me, told by the main male character who we are told halfway through the book that his name is Charlie is set in a dystopian 1982 Britain where the first humanoid robots are created. 1982 the year of the Falklands war, and in fact this is one of the few accurate historical references to those times. Others details of the everyday life may be misleading, especially if you are a contemporary reader: no, there were no laptops or WWW where one can search for various information and there are no social networks either. Also, the famous mathematician Alan Turing with whom Charlie met on several occasions died many years before, at the end of the 1960s.

Charlie, a middle class gal with a desire to earn money without too much physical work, is in love witht Miranda, a hardworking anthropologist. With the money left by his late mother, he purchased himself a robot whose neuronal connections operate at a larger scale, similarly with ChatGPT. But besides his informative part, the robot, called Adam, has feelings and as in the case of the legend of the Golem, once let by himself, he is acting in a very unexpected aggressive even way, as he fell in love with Miranda.

The topic regarding the limits of Artificial Intelligence - ´artificial´ stays for something here - is very challening even though we may be more familiar with robots nowadays than the characters from Machines Like Me but the story is such is very limited, with few turns whose details are getting lost in the robot´s emotional drama. 

McEwan´s gentle writing is always a win though although the story did not impress me at all.

Rating: 3 stars