Signed
Machines Like Me
Signed Waterstone's exclusive edition, 2019
Machines Like Me is Ian McEwan's 2019 novel set in an alternate 1982 London, where Alan Turing survived his 1954 persecution and went on to drive breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Britain has just lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher's government is tottering, Tony Benn leads the opposition, and the Beatles have reunited. Into this deflated, uncertain England, a batch of twenty-five synthetic humans, twelve Adams and thirteen Eves, has just come to market.
Charlie, a directionless thirty-something living in north Clapham on a modest inheritance, buys one of the Adams and recruits his upstairs neighbor Miranda to help design the android's personality settings. What follows is less a thriller than a sustained moral inquiry: Adam turns out to be a more principled being than either of the humans around him, and his presence forces both Charlie and Miranda to confront the compromises and secrets that structure their lives. The novel is as much about the alternate history as the AI, using Turing's survival to ask what a more ethically rigorous technological culture might have looked like, and whether it would have made us any better.
McEwan keeps the speculative elements tightly controlled. The interest here is not in AI run amok but in the uncomfortable possibility that a machine built to reason without self-deception might be right in ways that humans, for very human reasons, cannot afford to be.
Signed copy. Signed by McEwan on the title page, with "Signed Waterstones Exclusive Edition" sticker on the front cover.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, dark blue paper-covered boards, with blue silk bookmark. London: Jonathan Cape, 2019. ISBN: 9781785175381. #10291.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Charlie, a directionless thirty-something living in north Clapham on a modest inheritance, buys one of the Adams and recruits his upstairs neighbor Miranda to help design the android's personality settings. What follows is less a thriller than a sustained moral inquiry: Adam turns out to be a more principled being than either of the humans around him, and his presence forces both Charlie and Miranda to confront the compromises and secrets that structure their lives. The novel is as much about the alternate history as the AI, using Turing's survival to ask what a more ethically rigorous technological culture might have looked like, and whether it would have made us any better.
McEwan keeps the speculative elements tightly controlled. The interest here is not in AI run amok but in the uncomfortable possibility that a machine built to reason without self-deception might be right in ways that humans, for very human reasons, cannot afford to be.
Signed copy. Signed by McEwan on the title page, with "Signed Waterstones Exclusive Edition" sticker on the front cover.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, dark blue paper-covered boards, with blue silk bookmark. London: Jonathan Cape, 2019. ISBN: 9781785175381. #10291.
Fine in fine dust jacket.