Artificial Intelligence

Ian McEwan and the literary potential of artificial intelligence


Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan's 15th novel, explores issues of artificial intelligence, robots and human morality.

Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan’s 15th novel, explores issues of artificial intelligence, robots and human morality.

It is set in a counterfactual, early ’80s Britain, when Margaret Thatcher is still prime minister despite her expeditionary force having been humiliated in the Falklands War, the left-wing Labour leader, Tony Benn, is on the verge of power and, crucially for the purposes of the novel, Alan Turing, the brilliant mind who led the code-breaking at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, has not committed suicide but has lived on and continued important scientific work in the area of Artificial Intelligence.

This mise en scene – a kind of arabesque, McEwan calls it – “runs in parallel and supports the notion that in 1982 you could conceivably have a fully plausible artificial human”.

Charlie Friend uses a windfall to pay £86,000 for one of the first artificial humans. His name – “there was no way round it” – is Adam; the females are Eves. Charlie and his girlfriend, Miranda, who lives in the flat upstairs, program Adam to be their best parts and he becomes, initially, a sort of quasi-human, technological retainer.

McEwan has always had an interest in AI and reckons if “civilisation is going to persist without a nuclear war or devastating climate change, the general line of approach into the future seems pretty clear”.

“It’s a very compelling human desire, which has stitched itself into myths like Prometheus, the book of Genesis, Jason and the Argonauts and the giant robot in that, Talos. So it’s a thing very deep in the human imagination. And now, faintly at least, the technological capabilities are there. We are beginning to interface with artificial intelligence.”

There is mystery lurking in Miranda’s background that will sew the seeds for disruption and a terrible crisis for the couple. Along the way, the two encounter a troubled little boy whose parents seem happy to abandon him to their care, Adam’s intelligence and moral perspective create new and complex problems, and Charlie encounters his hero, Turing.

The moral dilemma that emerges is, for McEwan, the heart of the novel. (No spoilers, so not too many details.) “We have in all our philosophies and all our religions – in all our gossip over the garden fence – a very strong sense of what’s good. We frequently fail to live up to it, but we can imagine, because it’s already started happening, what kind of moral precepts you might put into an artificial mind. We would want to take the best parts of ourselves and then find we have rather confusingly or conflictingly built our moral superior.

“I settled on one [a dilemma] in which the reader – it’s really a problem of rhetorical position – would sense both that Adam was right in the general sense of the precept, but Miranda and Charles were right at the level the way emotion importantly affects our moral decisions.”

The problem as McEwan sees it is if these artificial humans are made nicer than ourselves, we will be creating problems for them.

And in the novel the way Charlie sees it is that “a perfectly formed moral system should float free of any particular disposition. But could it? Confined to a hard drive, moral software was merely the dry equivalent of the brain-in-the-dish thought experiment that once littered philosophical textbooks.Whereas an artificial human had to get down among us, imperfect, fallen us, and rub along. Hands assembled in sterile factory conditions must get dirty.”

Turing has been a hero of McEwan’s since he read some of his writing in the late ’60s and early ’70s, particularly on the universal computing machine. “And, of course, there was his extraordinary work in cracking German naval codes in the war, his interest in biology, in morphology, his interest in revisiting quantum mechanics, especially Paul Dirac, and then, of course, his tragic end in the appalling laws of the time.

“It was in a way almost trying to atone for his persecution that I imagined him becoming this central figure not only in science and computer science but also in shifts in attitudes towards gay people and becoming a rather dashing figure, and rather formidable.”

McEwan and I are talking a few days after a massive demonstration in London against Brexit and the day before Britain was originally supposed to have departed the European Union. He marched in the demo, one that was bigger even than the huge anti-Iraq War protest he made such good use of in Saturday.

He thinks Brexit is “an absolute monstrous insanity”, a local problem that has spilled out of a 40-year civil war within the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Theresa May.

“I think more broadly something toxic has entered the bloodstream of politics globally and we see it across Europe in Austria, Poland, Hungary, Italy and, of course, Britain. But we’ve obviously seen it with Trump, we see it in Brazil now, we’re seeing it in Turkey. It really is worrying because the last people to be remotely concerned about climate change are populists.

“And we have the very much under-reported nuclear arms race now. Again, nationalism and xenophobia feed into that and populism is not interested in making slow progress through diplomacy with international deals. The ease with which Trump can bend or not renew an old nuclear deal is extremely worrying.”

Mcewan is not averse to writing fiction about Brexit but the problem is how to do it. After all, Brexit is statistics, treaties and political intentions – not really the stuff of novels. “I think the best response to Brexit at the moment is journalism.”

Despite turning 71 in June, McEwan, who burst onto the literary scene in 1975 with his brilliant collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, and has been a significant presence ever since, has written three screenplays (The Children Act, A Child in Time and Sweet Tooth), pieces for various publications, and Machines Like Me over the past two or three years. He reckons he didn’t work this hard in his 30s.

At Adelaide I had asked him whether his major characters lived on in his head after he completed a novel and he assured me then they didn’t. So I wondered whether adapting his books changed his relationship with his characters.

“That’s a good question. Especially not only in adapting but in making the movie. I don’t think I could open Atonement without seeing Saoirse Ronan. I couldn’t open The Children Act without seeing Emma Thompson, and Saoirse Ronan has now stolen my notion of On Chesil Beach.”

Once the screenplay is over, the film has come and gone “they die another death, but Lazarus-like they have a brief Zombie-like thing”.

However, he is so immersed in the work that sometimes the different forms start to merge. He has had the odd experience of supposedly talking about one of his novels in an interview and finding that he’s actually talking about the screenplay, which might be significantly different.

As our chat draws to a close, we return to Turing and Bletchley Park. I tell him my mother worked there during the later stages of the war, but she didn’t talk in detail about it because she had signed the Official Secrets Act.

When he was researching his television play, The Imitation Game, he talked to some women who had worked there. At first they too wouldn’t talk, but he showed them newspaper cuttings saying the act had been lifted.

“One woman said memorably ‘I never told anyone and I never even spoke to my husband’. I asked why not. ‘He was in the infantry and he’s always talking about the war and he’d be so cross if it turned out my war was more important than his.’ So sad and funny all at once.”

Machines Like Me is published on April 16 by Jonathan Cape at $32.99.

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