Ian McEwan’s latest book Machines Like Me has a humanoid robot as a central character. Unfortunately I don’t think he’s a terrifically interesting robot; he’s not very different to a naïve human in most respects, except for certain unlikely gifts; an ability to discuss literature impressively and an ability to play the stock market with steady success. No real explanation for these superpowers is given; it’s kind of assumed that direct access to huge volumes of information together with a computational brain just naturally make you able to do these things. I don’t think it’s that easy, though in fairness these feats only resemble the common literary trick where our hero’s facility with languages or amazingly retentive memory somehow makes him able to perform brilliantly at tasks that actually require things like insight and originality.

The robot is called Adam; twenty-five of these robots have been created, twelve Adams and thirteen Eves, on the market for a mere £86,000 each. This doesn’t seem to make much commercial sense; if these are prototypes you wouldn’t sell them; if you’re ready to market them you’d be gearing up to make thousands of them, at least. Surely you’d charge more, too – you could easily spend £86k on a fancy new car. But perhaps prices are misleading, because we are in an alternate world.

This is perhaps the nub of it all. The prime difference here is that in the world of the novel, Alan Turing did not die, and was mainly responsible for a much faster development of computers and IT. Plausible humanoid robots have appeared in 1982. This seems to me an unhelpful contribution to the myth of Turing as ‘Mr Computer’. It’s sadly plausible that if he had lived longer he would have had more to contribute; but most likely in other mathematical fields, not in the practical development of the computer, where many others played key roles (as they did at Bletchley). If you ask me, John Von Neumann was more than capable of inventing computers on his own, and in fact in the real postwar world they developed about as fast as they could have done whether Turing was alive or not. McEwan nudges things along a bit more by having Tesla around to work on silicon chips (!) and he brings Demis Hassabis back a bit so he can be Turing’s collaborator (Hassabis evidently doomed to work on machine learning whenever he’s born). This is all a bit silly, but McEwan enjoys it enough to have advanced IT in Exocet missiles give victory to Argentina in the Falklands war, with consequences for British politics which he elaborates in the background of the story. It’s a bit odd that Argentina should get an edge from French IT when we’re being asked to accept that the impeccably British ‘Sir’ Alan Turing was personally responsible for the great technical leap forward which has been made, but it’s pointless to argue over what it is ultimately not much more than fantasy.

Turing appears in the novel, and I hate the way he’s portrayed. One of McEwan’s weaknesses, IMO, is his reverence for the British upper class, and here he makes Sir Alan into the sort of grandee he admires; a lordly fellow with a large house in North London who summons people when he wants information, dismisses them when he’s finished, and hands out moral lectures. Obviously I don’t know what Turing was really like, but to me his papers give the strong impression of an unassuming man of distinctly lower middle class origins; a far more pleasant person than the arrogant one we get in the book.

McEwan doesn’t give us any great insight into how Adam comes to have human-like behaviour (and surely human-like consciousness). His fellow robots are prone to a sort of depression which leads them to a form of suicide; we’re given the suggestion that they all find it hard to deal with human moral ambiguity, though it seems to me that humans in their position (enslaved to morally dubious idiots) might get a bit depressed too. As the novel progresses, Adam’s robotic nature seems to lose McEwan’s interest anyway, as a couple of very human plots increasingly take over the story.

McEwan got into trouble for speaking dismissively of science fiction; is Machines Like Me SF? On a broad reading I’d say why not? – but there is a respectable argument to be made for the narrower view. In my youth the genre was pretty well-defined. There were the great precursors; Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and perhaps Mary Shelley, but SF was mainly the product of the American pulp magazines of the fifties and sixties, a vigorous tradition that gave rise to Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein at the head of a host of others. That genre tradition is not extinct, upheld today by, for example, the beautiful stories of Ted Chiang.

At the same time, though, SF concepts have entered mainstream literature in a new way. The Time Traveller’s Wife, for example, obviously makes brilliant use of an SF concept, but does so in the service of a novel which is essentially a love story in the literary mainstream of books about people getting married which goes all the way back to Pamela. There’s a lot to discuss here, but keeping it brief I think the new currency of SF ideas comes from the impact of computer games. The nerdy people who create computer games read SF and use SF concepts; but even non-nerdy people play the games, and in that way they pick up the ideas, so that novelists can now write about, say, a ‘portal’ and feel confident that people will get the idea pretty readily; a novel that has people reliving bits of their lives in an attempt to get them right (like The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle) will not get readers confused the way it once would have done. But that doesn’t really make Evelyn Hardcastle SF.

I think that among other things this wider dispersal of a sort of SF-aware mentality has led to a vast improvement in the robots we see in films and the like. It used to be the case that only one story was allowed: robots take over. Latterly films like Ex Machina or Her have taken a more sophisticated line; the TV series Westworld, though back with the take-over story, explicitly used ideas from Julian Jaynes.

So, I think we can accept that Machines Like Me stands outside the pure genre tradition but benefits from this wider currency of SF ideas. Alas, in spite of that we don’t really get the focus on Adam’s psychology that I should have preferred.