Machines Like Me

by Ian McEwan

The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.

An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.

There’s a special dispensation in the sensuousness of an unshared bed, at least for a while, until sleeping alone begins to assume its own quiet sadness.

The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.

‘From a certain point of view, the only solution to suffering would be the complete extinction of humankind.’

‘Autonomous’ was never the right word, for the new cars were as dependent as newborn babies on mighty networks of computers linked to satellites and on-board radar. If artificial intelligence was to guide these vehicles safely home, what set of values or priorities should be assumed in the software? Fortunately, in moral philosophy there already existed a well-explored set of dilemmas known in the business as ‘the trolley problem’. Adapted easily to cars, the sort of problem manufacturers and their software engineers now posed was this: you, or rather, your car is driving at the maximum legal speed along a narrow suburban road. The traffic is flowing nicely. On the pavement on your side of the road is a group of children. Suddenly, one of them, a child of eight, runs out across the road, right into your path. There’s a fraction of a second to make a decision – either mow the child down, swerve onto the crowded pavement, or into the oncoming traffic and collide head on with a truck at a closing speed of eighty miles an hour. You’re alone, so that’s fine, sacrifice or save yourself. What if your spouse and your two children are in the car? Too easy? What if it’s your only daughter, or your grandparents, or your pregnant daughter and your son-in-law, both in their mid-twenties? Now, take into account the occupants of the truck. A fraction of a second is more than enough time for a computer to give thorough consideration to all the issues. The decision will depend on the prior...

Asimov’s laws of robotics

The summer was hot and something was coming to the boil. Apart from the government’s unpopularity, much else was rising: unemployment, inflation, strikes, traffic jams, suicide rates, teenage pregnancies, racist incidents, drug addiction, homelessness, rapes, muggings and depression among children.

We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. 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. Artificial minds are not so well defended.