Machines Like Me

by Ian McEwan

As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them.

I’ve been giving some thought lately to the mystery of the self. Some say it’s an organic element or process embedded in neural structures. Others insist that it’s an illusion, a by-product of our narrative tendencies.’

but I can’t help loving her. I don’t want to stop. As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.

when they are, and a brain–machine interface is efficient and cheap, you’ll become a partner with your machines in the open-ended expansion of intelligence, and of consciousness generally. Colossal intelligence, instant access to deep moral acumen and to everything known,

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. Our literatures will lose their unwholesome nourishment.

There’s more than one kind of intelligence. We’d learned that it was a mistake to attempt to slavishly imitate the human sort. We’d wasted a lot of time. Now we could set the machine free to draw its own conclusions and reach for its own solutions. But when we’d got well past that gateway, we found we had entered nothing more than a kindergarten. Not even that.’