They soon confront profound questions: Can a machine feel emotions? Is Adam a lodger, a servant or a highly intelligent household appliance? Does cheating on your partner with a robot count as adultery? Narrator Charlie Friend, a smart but directionless thirty-something, spends his inheritance on Adam, one of the first “truly viable manufactured human(s) with plausible intelligence and looks.”Īdam, Charlie and Charlie’s neighbor/girlfriend Miranda form an unorthodox household. The messy relationship between human minds and artificial ones is the focus of Machines Like Me, published in the U.S. “Actual humans transcribing, and some lady singing in the shower being laughed at,” he shudders.

He’d be wary of owning a driverless car - “I don’t even like cruise control” - and he’s grown suspicious of his household digital assistant since the revelation that staff at Amazon listened to recordings of people speaking to their Alexa devices.

In real life, the Booker Prize-winning author is conflicted. The messy relationship between human minds and artificial ones is the focus of Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me.(Instagram) His new novel, Machines Like Me, features a lifelike android with access to all human knowledge who writes haiku poetry. Ian McEwan is fascinated by artificial intelligence.

Ian mcewan machines like me summary