Machines Like Me
Book description
From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—”a sharply intelligent novel of ideas” (The New York Times) that asks whether a machine can understand the human heart, or whether we are the ones who lack understanding.
Set in an uncanny alternative 1982 London—where Britain has lost the Falklands…
Why read it?
4 authors picked Machines Like Me as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Adam is a limited edition robot who can pass for human (something I can’t do on a bad day). It takes a while for Adam to learn to be part of that world, but as time passes, he moves from being the slave of his owner Charlie to being better than him in every way (just ask his girlfriend!). I kept thinking of what would it be like to have a better version of me hanging around the house. It took slaves a long time to be recognized as people, how long for the robots?
From Peter's list on where we expect AI to behave as our tool, but.
Can a novel live simultaneously in the future as well as the past? I admired Ian McEwan for pulling off this lofty feat. He imagined how if just one historical event had played out differently, we would have already been living in our own future by the time of the 1980s, with AI and robots already part of everyday life. Set in London, some of the events of our past are still there, but also so much has changed. The result is an entertaining but troubling mix of nostalgia, imagination, and ultimately speculation about what robots will mean for our…
From Chris' list on speculative fiction that blew my mind.
This is another wonderful book about Artificial Intelligence written not by a technologist but by one of the greatest living writers, Ian McEwan. Again the story is as much about what it is to be human as it is about super-intelligent machines. But this is not surprising. AI is ultimately one of the most important scientific questions of the next 100 years for precisely this – what it tells us about us, as much as what it tells us about intelligent machines.
From Toby's list on artificial intelligence and human intelligence.
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The Road from Belhaven
The Road from Belhaven is set in 1880s Scotland. Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small girl that she can see the future. But she soon realises that she must keep her gift a secret. While she can sometimes glimpse…
Another brilliant novel that stretches our understanding of what it means to be human. The premise is that advances in artificial intelligence happened much more quickly in the 1980s than was actually the case, to the point where people can purchase an android as a companion. Charlie, a 32-year-old Londoner, purchases Adam, who looks like a human, talks like a human, and even has sex like a human (resulting in a bizarre love triangle between Charlie, Adam, and Charlie’s neighbor, Miranda). But Adam isn’t human. Or is he?
That is the question. Note: The rules prohibited me from listing two…
From Timothy's list on self knowledge.
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