Machines Like Me

by Ian McEwan

But artificial humans were a cliché long before they arrived, so when they did, they seemed to some a disappointment.

By the early seventies, digital communication had discarded its air of convenience and become a daily chore.

This was what cowardice was, a surfeit of imagining.

“If he looks and sounds and behaves like a person, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s what he is. I make the same assumption about you. About everybody. We all do.

“We’re in love with the same woman. We can talk about it in a civilised manner, as you just have. Which convinces me that we’ve passed the point in our friendship when one of us has the power to suspend the consciousness of the other.”

He read Schrödinger’s Dublin lectures, What Is Life?, from which he concluded that he was alive.

The world is so connected now, however crudely, and change is so widely distributed that progress is hard to perceive.

“It could be the end of mental privacy.

Do we want our new friends to accept that sorrow and pain are the essence of our existence? What happens when we ask them to help us fight injustice?

But truth isn’t always everything.” Adam looked at me blankly. “That’s an extraordinary thing to say. Of course truth is everything.”

I was lucky to stumble on good reasons to live. Mathematics…poetry, and love for you.

hope you’ll listen to…to one last seventeen-syllable poem. It owes a debt to Philip Larkin. But it’s not about leaves and trees. It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you. Believe me, these lines express no triumph…Only regret.”