Machines Like Me

Machines Like Me is the latest novel by Ian McEwan. Although I wasn’t really a fan of Solar I really got carried away with this book. The world is somewhat different from ours and if I remember it correctly it takes place in 1984. Some technology is more advanced than ours and McEwan ponders quite some interesting questions.

Can a machine think? Can it love? The laws of nature don’t forbid it, yet at the same time we don’t know what makes us tick / conscious. The final chapter also ponders what the rights of (humanoid) robots are, could we just kill them?

The writing of McEwan is great, and quite funny in a somewhat dark way. I got a lot of references to machine intelligence, p vs np-problem, Alan Turing, etc. The politics I was only partially aware of, but that didn’t take center stage.