Machines Like Me

by Ian McEwan

But I decided to join in. “It’s been said that killing everyone would be a cure for cancer. Utilitarianism can be logically absurd.”

If there was sadness in his life, it was well concealed behind a dignified manner.

Simon and I discussed the cricket—three consecutive sixes and a pitch invasion at the India–England T20—while Adam stood apart before an array of canned goods on a shelf. They would be instantly familiar to him, their commercial histories, market share, nutritional value. But as we chatted, it was obvious he wasn’t looking at tins of peas, or anything at all.

I made a mental note: he was in need of an appearance of plausibility whenever doing nothing. His eyes were open, but he failed to blink.

he turned to address Simon in formal terms. “Your self, you say. There’s a coincidence. 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.” There was a silence, then, stiffening a little, Simon said, “Well, sir, which is it? What have you decided?” “It’s the way I’m made. I’m bound to conclude that I’ve a very powerful sense of self and I’m certain that it’s real and that neuroscience will describe it fully one day. Even when it does, I won’t know this self any better than I do now. But I do have moments of doubt when I wonder whether I’m subject to a form of Cartesian error.” By this time I had the journal in my hands and was preparing to leave. “Take the Buddhists,” Simon said. “They prefer to get along without a self.” “Indeed. I’d like to meet one.

I didn’t mind being told again about love. Here before me were all of its warm possibilities, barely three feet away, and it was all I needed.

“Of course. As I said, when describing the future there can be no absolute values. Only shifting degrees of likelihood.” “But they’re entirely subjective.” “Correct. Ultimately Bayes reflects a state of mind. As does all of common sense.”

There was much pleasure in following a line of thought without opposition. I was hardly the first to think it, but one could see the history of human self-regard as a series of demotions tending to extinction. Once we sat enthroned at the centre of the universe, with sun and planets, the entire observable world, turning around us in an ageless dance of worship. Then, in defiance of the priests, heartless astronomy reduced us to an orbiting planet around the sun, just one among other rocks. But still we stood apart, brilliantly unique, appointed by the creator to be lords of everything that lived. Then biology confirmed that we were at one with the rest, sharing common ancestry with bacteria, pansies, trout and sheep. In the early twentieth century came deeper exile into darkness when the immensity of the universe was revealed and even the sun became one among billions in our galaxy, among billions of galaxies. Finally, in consciousness, our last redoubt, we were probably correct to believe that we had more of it than any creature on earth. But the mind that had once rebelled against the gods was about to dethrone itself by way of its own fabulous reach. In the compressed version, we would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension. What need then of us?

Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.

Not good—my mind, that is. Embodied, it told all.

But Alan Turing himself had often said and written in his youth that the moment we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine.

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.”

While mounted policemen charged at miners, and manufacturing towns across the country began their long, sad descent in the cause of free markets, the subject of robot ethics was born. The international automobile industry consulted philosophers, judges, specialists in medical ethics, game theorists and parliamentary committees. Then, in universities and research institutes, the subject expanded on its own.

The world’s religions and great literatures demonstrated clearly that we knew how to be good. We set out our aspirations in poetry, prose and song, and we knew what to do. The problem was in the enactment, consistently and en masse. What survived the temporary death of the autonomous car was a dream of redemptive robotic virtue. Adam and his cohort were its early embodiment, so the user’s manual implied. He was supposed to be my moral superior.

A perfectly formed moral system should float free of any particular disposition. But could it? Confined to a hard drive, moral software was merely the dry equivalent of the brain-in-a-dish thought experiment that once littered philosophical textbooks. Whereas an artificial human had to get down among us, imperfect, fallen us, and rub along. Hands assembled in sterile factory conditions must get dirty. To exist in the human moral dimension was to own a body, a voice, a pattern of behaviour, memory and desire, experience solid things and feel pain.

I had just learned from the front page that the first permanent artificial heart had been installed in a man called Barney Clark.

Arguing with the person you love is its own peculiar torment. The self divides against itself. Love slugs it out with its Freudian opposite. And if death wins and love dies, who gives a damn? You do, which enrages you and makes you more reckless yet.

Machine consciousness—was it possible? That old question. I opted for Alan Turing’s protocol. Its beauty and simplicity never appealed to me more than it did now. The Master came to my rescue.

“Listen,” I said. “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.

Get out of commodities.

I said, “You could call it curiosity on Adam’s part. Or regard it as some kind of algorithm.” “What’s the difference?” Turing’s point precisely. But I said nothing.

How much easier it would have been if I didn’t love her. Then I could have been alive to her needs instead of calculating my own as well.

The month’s rent was due and there was less than £40 in the bank. I had shares in a Brazilian rare earth mining company and this could be the day to sell.

Thousands of possibilities must have been sifted, assigned a value, a utility function and a moral weighting.

I wondered if Adam had the capacity to understand the joy of dance, of movement for its own sake, and whether Miranda was showing him a line he couldn’t cross. If so, she may have been wrong. Adam could imitate and respond to emotions and appear to take pleasure in reasoning. He might also have known something of the purposeless beauty of art.

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. Benign elements were rising too: households with indoor lavatories, central heating, phones and broadband; students at school until eighteen, working-class students at university; attendance at classical music concerts, car and home ownership, holidays abroad, museum and zoo visits, takings at bingo halls, salmon in the Thames, numbers of TV channels, numbers of women in Parliament, charity donations, native tree plantings, paperback book sales, music lessons across all ages and instruments and styles.

More people than ever joined choirs, more people gardened, more people wanted to cook interestingly.

Everything was rising—hopes and despair, misery, boredom and opportunity. There was more of everything. It was a time of plenty.

“I can’t help my feelings. You have to allow me my feelings.” I thought for a moment. “Do you really feel anything at all?” “That’s not a question I can—” “Answer it.” “I feel things profoundly. More than I can say.” “Difficult to prove,” I said. “Indeed. An ancient problem.”

“You’re wrong. There are many things to say and this is the first. Existentially, this is not your territory. In every conceivable sense, you’re trespassing.”

As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.

Usually it oppressed me to reflect that every car contained a nexus of worries, memories and hopes as vital and complicated as my own. Today I welcomed and forgave everyone. We would all turn out well. We were all bound together in our own overlapping but distinct forms of comedy.

He was far more complicated than I’d imagined, and so were my own feelings about him.

No mechanistic explanation could help. It couldn’t resolve the essential difference between us. I had little idea of what passed along my own optic nerve, or where it went next, or how these pulses became an encompassing self-evident visual reality, or who was doing my seeing for me. Only me. Whatever the process was, it had the trick of seeming beyond explanation, of creating and sustaining an illuminated part of the one thing in the world we knew for sure—our own experience. It was hard to believe that Adam possessed something like that. Easier to believe that he saw in the way a camera does, or the way a microphone is said to listen. There was no one there.

In my fatigue, I felt unmoored, drifting into the oceanic blue and black, moving in two directions at once—towards the uncontrollable future we were making for ourselves where we might finally dissolve our biological identities; at the same time, into the ancient past of 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.

How I decided to invest it in a grand experiment, to buy an artificial human, an android, a replicate—I forget which term I used. In his presence, they all sounded like insults. I told him exactly how much I paid.

It was only when I got there that I knew what I had to say. My point was this: I had bought him, he was mine, I had decided to share him with Miranda, and it would be our decision, and only ours, to decide when to deactivate him.

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.”

I felt a sudden elated detachment. I didn’t, I couldn’t, love her less. But I no longer had to feel anxious or desperate about her. I remembered my truisms from the day before. Here she was, and whatever she was, I would find out and celebrate her, regardless. I could love her, so I thought, and remain immune, unharmed.

He read Schrödinger’s Dublin lectures, What Is Life?, from which he concluded that he was alive. He read the transcript of the celebrated 1927 Solvay conference, when the luminaries of physics met to discuss photons and electrons.

Whereas Einstein thought there was no science without belief in an external world independent of the observer. He didn’t think quantum mechanics was wrong so much as incomplete.”

“Quantum mechanics makes predictions to such a fabulous degree of accuracy, it must be getting something right about nature. To creatures of our immense size, the material world looks blurred and feels hard. But now we know how strange and wonderful it is. So it shouldn’t surprise us that consciousness, your sort and mine, could arise from an arrangement of matter—it’s clearly odd to just the right degree. And we don’t have anything else to explain how matter can think and feel.” Then he added, “Except for beams of love from the eyes of God. But then, beams can be investigated.”

The odd thing is, there’s no boundary, no edge. There isn’t vision and then blackness, like you get when you look through binoculars. There isn’t something, then nothing. What we have is the field of vision, and then beyond it less than nothing.” “So?” “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. Life, then death. It’s a foretaste, Charlie, and it’s there all day.” “Nothing to be afraid of then,” I said. He raised both hands as if to grip and shake a trophy. “Exactly right! Less than nothing to be afraid of!”

“That’s the difference between us, Charlie. My body parts will be improved or replaced. But my mind, my memories, experiences, identity and so on will be uploaded and retained. They’ll be of use.”

I’d been interested at first in learning what Adam could create. But I soon lost interest in the form itself. Too cute, too devoted to not making much sense, too undemanding of their author as they played on empty mysteries of the sound-of-one-hand-clapping sort. Two thousand! The figure made my point—an algorithm was churning them out.

Perhaps I was too harsh. Haikus, I told him, could be stifling in their stillness. But I was also encouraging. Time to move on to another form. He had access to all the world’s literature. Why not attempt a poem with verses of four lines, rhyming or not? Or even a short story and eventually a novel?

“My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future. I want to refine and extend the form. Everything I’ve done so far is a kind of limbering up. My juvenilia. When I’ve studied the masters and understood more, especially when I’ve grasped the power of the kireji, the cutting word that separates the two juxtaposed parts, my real work can begin.”

But beyond the currents of disheartening facts about human nature and societies and daily bad news, there can be mightier stirrings, positive developments that are lost to view. The world is so connected now, however crudely, and change is so widely distributed that progress is hard to perceive. I don’t like to boast, but one of those changes is right in front of you. The implications of intelligent machines are so immense that we’ve no idea what you—civilisation, that is—have set in motion. One anxiety is that it will be a shock and an insult to live with entities that are cleverer than you are. But already almost everyone knows someone cleverer than themselves. On top of which, you underestimate yourselves.”

above all, profound misunderstanding of others. Of course, goodness is on show too, and heroism, grace, wisdom, truth. Out of this rich tangle have come literary traditions, flourishing, like the wild flowers in Darwin’s famous hedgerow.

I’m sure we’ll treasure the literature of the past, even as it horrifies us. We’ll look back and marvel at how well the people of long ago depicted their own shortcomings, how they wove brilliant, even optimistic fables out of their conflicts and monstrous inadequacies and mutual incomprehension.”