Machines Like Me

by Ian McEwan

It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.

whatever had once happened was no more than its evidence.

we are disposed to make patterns, narratives, when we should be thinking probabilistically if we want to make good choices.

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

How easy to conjure worlds in which

66 million years ago the earth had turned for another few minutes before the meteor struck, so missing the sun-blotting, fine-grained gypsum sand of the Yucatan, allowing the dinosaurs to live on and deny future space to the mammals, clever apes included.

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

We had lost thousands of young men and women to the cause of Mrs. Thatcher’s ambitions. My voice began to rise before I remembered. I resumed quietly but with a certain tremor: that she remained in office after such slaughter was the greatest political scandal of our time.

Through the night, I’d fantasised Adam’s destruction. I saw my hands tighten around the rope I used to drag him towards the filthy River Wandle. If only he hadn’t cost me so much. Now he was costing me more. His moment with Miranda couldn’t have been a struggle between principle and the pursuit of pleasure. His erotic life was a simulacrum. He cared for her as a dishwasher cares for its dishes.

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. In an attacking move, ignore bishop or castle. Logic and straight lines were out. Best to rely on the knight.

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

I hunted the bear with my knife. I hunted the bear with my wife. Without thinking about it, you know that you can’t use your wife to kill a bear. The second sentence is easy to understand, even though it doesn’t contain all of the necessary information. A machine would struggle.

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

there’s nothing in all their beautiful code that could prepare Adam and Eve for Auschwitz.

and try to follow him through the next.” I turned back and tried to understand the problem. I learned that P stood for polynomial time and N stood for non-deterministic. That took me nowhere. My first meaningful discovery was that if the equation was shown not to be true, that would be extremely helpful, for then everyone could stop thinking about it. But if there was a positive proof, that P really did equate to NP, it

would have, in the words of the mathematician Stephen Cook, who formulated the problem in these terms in 1971, “potentially stunning practical consequences.” But what was the problem? I came across an example, an apparently famous one, that helped only a little. A travelling salesman has a hundred cities on his patch. He knows all the distances between every pair of cities. He needs to visit each city once and end up at his starting point. What’s his shortest route? I came to understand the following: the number of possible routes is vast, far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. In a thousand years a powerful computer wouldn’t have time to measure out each route one by one. If P equals NP, there’s a discoverable right answer. But if someone gave the salesman the quickest route, it could be quickly verified mathematically as the correct answer. But only in retrospect. Without a positive solution, or without being handed the key to the shortest route, the travelling salesman remains in the dark.