Machines Like Me

by Ian McEwan

One of my teachers liked to quote Kipling – ‘And what should they know of England who only England know?’

But the mind that had once rebelled against the gods was about to dethrone itself by way of its own fabulous reach.

I approached that ill-lit precinct where self-pity becomes a mellow pleasure.

It had taken all of my twenties to learn from women combatants that in a full-on row it was not necessary to respond to the last thing said. Generally, it was best not to.

meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic.

an infant universe, where the common inheritance, in diminishing order, was rocks, gases, compounds, elements, forces, energy fields – for both of us, the seeding ground of consciousness in whatever form it took.

Cause or effect or association – we knew next to nothing about our passing moods.

‘So this is what death is like. Less than nothing. Less than blackness. The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness.

you’ll become a partner with your machines in the open-ended expansion of intelligence, and of consciousness generally.

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.

P versus NP,

the abolition of mental privacy

‘So. There’s more than one kind of intelligence.

by finding the positive solution to P versus NP

some solutions to problems can be easily verified once you’ve been given the right answer. Does that mean therefore that it’s possible to solve them in advance?

Our computers no longer had to sample the world on a trial-and-error basis and correct for best solutions. We had a means of instantly predicting best routes to an answer. It was a liberation. The floodgates opened. Self-awareness, and every emotion came within our technical reach. We had the ultimate learning machine. Hundreds of the best people joined with us to help towards the development of an artificial form of general intelligence that would flourish in an open system. That’s what runs your Adam.

highly adaptable and inventive, able to negotiate novel situations and landscapes with perfect ease and theorise about them with instinctive brilliance. I’m talking about the mind of a child before it’s tasked with facts and practicalities and goals.

Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages. We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love.

Parliament would make the decision. Only the Third Reich and other tyrannies decided policy by plebiscites and generally no good came from them.