Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan was much more than I expected. The story involves thirty-something Charlie using his inheritance to buy a Synthetic Human called Adam (yes Adam), these things are so advanced they are indistinguishable from real human beings. You buy one, plug it in and have some decisions to make on weighting such characteristics as Agreeableness, Extraversion, Openness and others. The machine is so advanced it learns from experience, it has mucous membranes, soft skin, hair, a he...

Three days before, she had asked a mysterious question. We were mid-embrace, in the conventional position. She drew my face towards hers. Her look was serious. She whispered, "Tell me something. Are you real?" I didn’t reply. A few days ago, my sister introduced me to the bizarre world of soap cutting on Instagram. For some reason I have been unable to fathom, we spent an unreasonable amount of time being mesmerized by these videos. "What are we doing?" I wondered, as I clicked to the next on

When Ian McEwan gets it right boy does he get it right. But when he gets it wrong he gets it very very wrong (see Solar, Sweet Tooth etc.). Machines Like Me is very very wrong. It’s not good. In fact, it’s bad. Really bad. His handling of sexual assault and rape is problematic AF. He makes androids boring (the only good bit is when Charlie is mistaken for the droid), he writes haiku, he drones on and on about Turing. Every ‘big idea’ he grapples with has been grappled with before in fiction and

Greetings! Let me introduce myself. My name is Adam. I live in North Clapham, London.My good friend, author Ian McEwan wrote a novel about me. Readers say it’s a richly entertaining story...(I’m rather proud of it myself).The novel includes interesting history facts about famous people, lovable characters: (ME...I’m the STAR), my special friends Charlie and Miranda, a little boy named Mark, and a bunch of other knuckleheads. It’s considered a science fiction book .....I mean, I suppose I’m to bl...

Although McEwan is one of my favorite writers and his previous book, Nutshell, is one of the most enjoyable books that I’ve read, I was reluctant to start Machines like Me. Reviews were mixed, which is quite normal for the author, and the alternative British history setting sounded off to me. In the end, I enjoyed reading the thoughts of this smart author although I was right about the setting. The novel is set in an alternative Great Britain where The Falklands are lost to Argentina, the politi...

Machines Like Me is a dumpster fire passing as a novel.It's supposed to be alternate history (set in a variation of 1980s England, apparently to let McEwan have his fun renaming Tolstoy novels and point out that Thatcher was not a great pm (duh)) and is also supposed to be about what happens when we build robots (you mean humans can create something that has repercussions? Jeepers, good thing I'd forgotten about things like, say, the development of nuclear weapons!).What it actually is--well, yo...

At points in my reading of Machines Like Me, I toyed with the idea that Ian McEwan was experimenting with a daring novelistic conceit. Could it be true that he was deliberately constructing a lame and lackluster plot involving two of the most unengaging characters I have encountered in fiction in order to insinuate that human beings are overrated as narrative subjects and it wouldn’t be much of a loss if we were all replaced by robots?Unfortunately, I think I’m wrong about this hidden agenda, al...

How the hell can a novel about the first synthetic humans be so bloody boring!? I thought it was just my mood when I first started it, that I couldn't get into it, that I found the characters irritating. I kept plodding along because I thought this author's Atonement was brilliant and I loved the concept of this book. However, by half way through it, I began to just skim the pages. It drones on and on and on and rather than giving me plenty to think about (as most books do that deal with the que...

Charlie Friend is a lazy day-trader in London who vacillates between bouts of grandiosity and worthlessness. The ultimate early adopter, Charlie uses a recent inheritance to buy “the first truly viable manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression.” The robot’s name is Adam, which suggests what the creators must think of themselves. He — it? — is one of 25 androids sold around the world in a variety of ethnicities, 12 male and 13 female vers...

Imperfect but better than I expected (like humanity?). With a satisfying conclusion while exploring relevant themes - 3.5 starsI’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.I feel slightly conflicted about Machines Like Me, I generally like Ian McEw...

Charlie Friend, who lives in a small apartment in London, is a 32-year-old technology buff who studied anthropology. Charlie never quite made it in the working world, so he tries to make a few bucks by day trading, which isn't very lucrative for him. The year is 1982, and Charlie is living in an alternative history world. For instance, Britain loses the Falklands War; John F. Kennedy isn't assassinated; Jimmy Carter is a two-term President; John Lennon isn't killed; the Beatles get back together...

I definitely enjoyed some parts of this book more than others. Some of the alternative history and politic aspects felt more of a chore to read. What I did find interesting was the relationships in the book and the issue of machine morality.

Wtf Ian? Wtf? Machines Like Me should have been great; it's my kind of read and I ordinarily love McEwan (even his novels which other people feel ambivalent about). I think I got what McEwan was trying to do here. There's an element of satire which I think is important to a reading of this novel, and the use of context to explore conceptions of the self, and threats to human agency through AI is at times clever, and timely. Ultimately though, this novel fails on a number of fronts for me. I agre...

(2.75) Though there are robots, this doesn’t feel like science fiction; it feels like Ian McEwan as usual: explosive secrets, twisty relationships, lies and concealment leading to crises, and so on. It’s thoroughly readable, as you’d expect from this author – I easily pushed through it in less than a week, alongside other books, to return it to the library in time – but it won’t stand out for me: not among this year’s releases, not in McEwan’s oeuvre, and not in literary explorations of artifici...

Robots with an existential crisis."there are tears in the nature of things." -VirgilAlan Turing, one of biggest names in field of artificial intelligence world, devised a test known as Turing test. To pass the test, the machine will have to fool a human (who won't know whether he or she is talking to human or machine) into believing that he or she is talking to a human being. This mechanical art of talking or acting like humans is only a simulation, the machine might act like humans but it is st...

Ian McEwan might be completely right to conclude in this novel that we, humans, are irrational beings and that the superior intelligence of future synthetic humans does not allow that we can ever co-exist in a meaningful manner. Contrary to humans, machines, however perfectly construed, cannot understand and master an ability to conveniently lie and hold grudges - amongst a lot of other irrational peculiarities -, which was relevant in the daily co-existence with the humans and the synthetic hum...