42 | NewScientist | 20 April 2019OUR feelings about a new gadget
follow a familiar cycle: there is
excitement at a fresh toy, then
confusion as we struggle with
how it works, then we get bored
and chuck it in a cupboard. That,
roughly, is what protagonist
Charlie does in Ian McEwan’s
new book Machines Like Me
(Jonathan Cape). But the gadget
is an Adam, one of the first
humanoid robots and fruit of a
world in which Alan Turing stayed
alive. Set in an alternative 1980s,
where a weakened Conservative
PM (Margaret Thatcher) battles a
socialist leader (Tony Benn) over
the UK’s future in the European
Union, McEwan tackles Turing’s
big question: can machines think?You’ve often written about science
and scientists, but this is your first
science fiction ...
I don’t really see it as science
fiction. I’ve never been much
interested in the remote future.
Especially when people are
crossing the galaxy at five times
the speed of light and wearing
anti-gravity boots. I could never
suspend my disbelief. I come at
this more in a personal way. What
it would be like to have, in front
of you, in your house, in your life,
a machine that tells you it can
think, and poses the problem for
you as to whether you believe it.With recent real developments in
artificial intelligence, did you feel
it was time to write this?
It was. I had a long chat withDemis Hassabis [head of Google’s
sister AI division DeepMind].
He’s really become one of the rock
stars of AI. In a way, it’s like all my
novels in that I don’t think I’m
doing research. At the time, it’s
just interesting me, and then
gets to a point where suddenly
it’s the next thing for me.Do you have an Alexa or a Siri?
We have an Alexa.How do you converse with it?
Mostly irritably. It’s kind of worn
off for me. I think there are these
technologies, which I mention at
the beginning of the novel, that
come and everyone’s excited
about them, then we realise they
don’t actually fit the human
pattern. So the fridges that could
tell you when your eggs are rotten
are completely extraneous. But
I’m plugged into all the usual stuff
that we can no longer live without.
I realised last night, when we
left to come here, suddenly the
internet interface with our central
heating didn’t work. Just two years
ago it would never have occurred
to me that you could turn on your
heating remotely. And now we
would just consider it a real
nuisance, like as if the pipes had
burst or something. The speed
with which we absorb these things
and either discard them or findthem boring when they break
down is quite astonishing.Do you think we’re in trouble
because we have become so
reliant on these technologies?
With AI, we’re going to have that
in spades. Already we’re having to
think ethically about autonomous
vehicles, and what kind of choices
they’re going to make. Do they
run over the granny, the dog, the
child, or allow the “driver” just to
kill themselves in a head-on crash?
We’re suddenly having to
devolve these choices to someone
else, to something else. The extent
to which we devolve moral
decisions to machines is going to
be a very awkward and interesting
ride. I’m sorry to be 70 and not see
more of the story. The area where
our interaction with machines
enters the moral domain is going
to be a field day for novelists.Your 1980s has more advanced
tech than we do – because Alan
Turing flourished. Do you think
he would have helped create it?
Who knows? Turing was young
when he died and would have
lived through the 60s, and as
a gay man maybe would have
benefited from a loosening of
the terrible laws that condemned
him. And he may or may not have
had an impact on the computer
revolution. He might have gone
off into biology. I have no idea.
For the purpose of this novel,
I have reinvented the past. There’s
something completely arbitraryand contingent about where we are
in the history of science. It could
have been earlier, it could have
been much later. And it could
have been elsewhere, too. So let’s
push the science on, and let’s have
Turing not commit suicide, then
why not shift everything so that
the politics is different, but not
entirely different?There’s a very Brexit feel to the
novel. Did you start out wanting
to marry it with AI morality?
I didn’t even think about it. I just
live in it so much. I’m a Brexit
junkie, so I have to read at least
50,000 words a day on it. It makes
me miserable, but I can’t leave it
alone. So even if I decided to keep
it out, it probably would have
been in there anyway since it’s
infused my every last neuron.When you designed Adam, was
that something you did as a whole
or as the story went along?
I take a novelist’s licence. He has a
body. He has sex. He has mucous
membranes. All these things are,
who knows, 200 years away. But
I needed all that in order to get to
the matter of how we’re going to
deal with what it would be like.
I was fantasising about the point
where it would become extremely
rude to say to you, “are you real?”.
At first, people would think it’s
very PC not to ask. Then, actually,
we just wouldn’t know. And then
we wouldn’t know whether the
prime minster was real. So I
played with the idea that it’s likeCULTURE
It is the 1980s, AI is rising
and Alan Turing is alive ...
A new novel, Machines Like Me, tackles artificial intelligence. Its author Ian McEwan talks to Jacob Aron
and explains why he’d love to live to see how AI and humans get on together in the real world“The extent to which we
devolve moral decisions
to machines is going to
be a very interesting ride”