Review: Machines Like Me

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

McEwan writes an off-kilter portrayal of a historically-changed early 1980s, with humanoid robots just being released to the public. It provokes thoughts on what it means to be human, but it rolls right on past assuming the robots in the story have earned sentience. I found it interesting that McEwan modified history in order to use Alan Turing as a character here. Turing is the author of the Turing Test, a well known measure of whether an artificial human exhibits intelligence and behavior making them indistinguishable from humans. I liked the idea that you get Turing’s take on machine intelligence as machines advance far beyond the state of affairs during his actual lifetime. McEwan could have gone quite a ways farther here, though, as Turing thoughts aren’t exposed in depth – McEwan plays him as a tinkerer. I also hoped to see Turing’s take on the early chatbots that effectively passed a limited Turing Test, in particular ELIZA (portraying an analyst) and PARRY (portraying a schizophrenic) (view spoiler)[, and this actually ends up being duplicated in a manner by the robots in the story committing suicide. I don’t recall any deep analysis of this in the book, but I do remember lectures on this from a college artificial intelligence course I took a few decades back. It ends up that you can think of many computer programs that could respond to questions in a manner similar to a human that is not a “normal” human adult. PARRY responded until he “got mad”, then didn’t respond, exactly like a schizophrenic might respond. Other programs might respond as a baby would respond, with baby sounds. And you can imagine other examples where someone reading a transcript between a person and the program might think the program’s dialog is by an actual human. It seems McEwan knew about this limited way to pass the Turing Test and wrote this book to investigate aspects of this. I’m not sure he went much beyond my college analysis, but it was entertaining, in an Issac Asimov kind of story. (hide spoiler)] Interesting story and alternative history, but could have gone deeper.

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