Machines Like Me

by Ian Mcewan

  Adam turned his head towards me. As always, too slowly. ‘Of course. As I said, when describing the future there can be no absolute values. Only shifting degrees of likelihood.’

  ‘But they’re entirely subjective.’

  ‘Correct. Ultimately Bayes reflects a state of mind. As does all of common sense.’

  Then nothing was solved, despite this high gloss of rationality. Miranda and I had different states of mind. What was new? But we were united against Adam in our differences. At least, this was my hope. He may have understood the relevant issue after all: he thought I was right about the Falklands and, given a degree of programmed intellectual honesty, the best he could offer Miranda, to whom he was also loyal, was an appearance of neutrality. But if that was sound, why not accept the mirror possibility, that he believed Miranda was right and I was the one in receipt of loyal support?

  With a sudden scrape of a kitchen chair, Miranda stood. There was a faint flush about her face and throat and she wasn’t looking at me. We’d be sleeping in separate beds that night. I would have happily unsaid my entire argument to stay with her. But I was dumb.

  She said to Adam, ‘You can stay up here to charge, if you like.’

  Adam needed six hours a night connected to a thirteen-amp socket. He went into sleep mode and sat quietly ‘reading’ until after dawn. Usually he was in my kitchen downstairs, but recently Miranda had bought a second charging cable.

  He murmured his thanks and slowly folded a kitchen towel in half with close attention, hunched over the task, and spread it across the draining board. As she moved towards her bedroom door she shot me a look, a regretful smile that didn’t part her lips, sent a conciliatory kiss across the space between us and whispered, ‘Just for tonight.’

  So we were fine.

  I said, ‘Of course I know you care about the dead.’

  She nodded and left. Adam was sitting down, pulling his shirt clear of his belt to locate the tethering point below his waistline. I put a hand on his shoulder and thanked him for clearing up.

  For me, it was far too early for bed and it was hot, like a summer evening in Marrakech. I went downstairs and looked in the fridge for something cool.

  *

  I remained in the kitchen, in an old leather armchair, with a balloon glass of Moldovan white. There was much pleasure in following a line of thought without opposition. I was hardly the first to think it, but one could see the history of human self-regard as a series of demotions tending to extinction. Once we sat enthroned at the centre of the universe, with sun and planets, the entire observable world, turning around us in an ageless dance of worship. Then, in defiance of the priests, heartless astronomy reduced us to an orbiting planet around the sun, just one among other rocks. But still, we stood apart, brilliantly unique, appointed by the creator to be lords of everything that lived. Then biology confirmed that we were at one with the rest, sharing common ancestry with bacteria, pansies, trout and sheep. In the early twentieth century came deeper exile into darkness when the immensity of the universe was revealed and even the sun became one among billions in our galaxy, among billions of galaxies. Finally, in consciousness, our last redoubt, we were probably correct to believe that we had more of it than any creature on earth. But the mind that had once rebelled against the gods was about to dethrone itself by way of its own fabulous reach. In the compressed version, we would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension. What need then of us?

  Such hot-air thoughts deserved a second, bigger balloon and I poured it. Head propped in my right palm, I approached that ill-lit precinct where self-pity becomes a mellow pleasure. I was a special case of the general banishment, though it wasn’t Adam I was thinking of. He wasn’t cleverer than me. Not yet. No, my exile was for one night only and it gave a twist of sweet, bearable agony to a hopeless love. My shirt unbuttoned to the waist, all windows open, the urban romance of getting thoughtfully drunk amid the heat and dust and muted din of north Clapham, in a world city. The imbalance of our affair was heroic. I imagined an onlooker’s approving gaze from a corner of the room. That well-formed figure slumped in his beaten-up chair. I rather loved myself. Someone had to. I rewarded myself with thoughts of her, mid-ecstasy, and considered the impersonal quality of her pleasures. I was only good enough for her, as many men might be. I refused the obvious, that her distance was the whip that drove my longing. But here was something strange. Three days before, she had asked a mysterious question. We were mid-embrace, in the conventional position. She drew my face towards hers. Her look was serious.

  She whispered, ‘Tell me something. Are you real?’

  I didn’t reply.

  She turned her head away so that I saw her in profile as her eyes closed and she lost herself once more in a maze of private pleasure.

  Later that night, I asked her about it. ‘It was nothing,’ was all she said before she changed the subject. Was I real? Meaning did I really love her, or was I honest, or did I fit her needs so exactly that she might have dreamed me up?

  I crossed the kitchen to pour the last of the wine. The broken fridge door handle needed a sharp sideways pull to engage its lock. As my hand closed round the cold neck of the bottle, I heard a sound, a creak above my head. I had lived long enough beneath Miranda’s feet to know her steps and their precise direction. She had moved across her bedroom and was hesitating in the threshold of her kitchen. I heard the murmur of her voice. No reply. She took another two steps into the room. The next would bring her onto a floorboard that under pressure made a truncated quacking sound. As I waited to hear it, Adam spoke. He pushed his chair back as he stood. If he was to take another step he would need to untether himself. This he must have achieved because it was his tread that landed on the noisy floorboard. That meant they were standing less than a metre apart, but there was no sound until a minute had passed, and now it was footsteps, two sets, moving back towards the bedroom.

  I left the fridge door open because the sound of it closing would betray me. No choice but to shadow them into my bedroom. So I went and stood by my desk and listened. I reckoned I was right under her bed when I heard the murmur of her voice, a command. She must have wanted air in the room, for Adam’s steps tracked across the room towards the Victorian bay. Only one of its three windows opened. Even that one was hard to shift on a warm or rainy day. The old wooden frames shrank or expanded, and something was wrong with the counterweight and hardened rope. Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.

  And how was my mind as I stood directly below, in an identical bay, reproduced by the thousands in late-Victorian industrial-scale developments? They had spilled across the five-acre fields of hedgerow and boundary oaks that adorned the southern limits of London. Not good – my mind, that is. Embodied, it told all. Shivering, moist, especially on the palms, raised pulse, in a state of elated anticipation. Fear, self-doubt, fury. In my bay, old fitted carpet, stained and worn since the mid-fifties, extended right to the skirting boards. In Miranda’s, the carpet gave way to bare boards that, two world wars back, must have been polished to a nut-brown gleam. Some poor girl in white apron and mob cap, on all fours, waxed cloth in hand, never could have dreamed of the kind of being who would one day stand in the place where she crouched. I heard him plant his feet on the old wood, I imagined him stooping to grip the window by the metal fixtures on its lower frame and heave upwards with the strength of four young men. There was a silence of straining resistance before the entire window shot upwards and hit the top casing with a rifle crack and a shattering of glass. My snort of delight could have given me away.

  No shortage now of marginally cooler air filling the room. My glee faded as Adam’s footsteps returned to where Miranda waited by the bed. As he went towards her, it might have been an apology that he muttered. Here was the sound of her forgiving him, for her brief sentence
was followed by the entwined mezzo and tenor of their laughter. I had trailed after Adam and was once more by the bed, six feet under. He had the manual skills to undress her and he was undressing her now. What else would occupy their silence? I knew – of course I knew – that her mattress made no sound. Futons, with their Japanese promise of a clean and simple life of stripped-back clarity, were the fashion then. And I myself felt washed in clarity, senses cleansed as I stood in the dark and waited. I could have run up the stairs and prevented them, burst into the bedroom like the clownish husband in an old seaside postcard. But my situation had a thrilling aspect, not only of subterfuge and discovery, but of originality, of modern precedence, of being the first to be cuckolded by an artefact. I was of my times, riding the breaking crest of the new, ahead of everyone in enacting that drama of displacement so frequently and gloomily predicted. Another element of my passivity: even at this earliest moment, I knew I had brought the whole thing down on myself. But that was for later. For now, despite the horror of betrayal, it was all too interesting and I couldn’t stir from my role of eavesdropper, the blind voyeur, humiliated and alert.

  It was my mind’s eyes, or my heart’s, that watched as Adam and Miranda lay down on the unyielding embrace of the futon and found the comfortable posture for a clasp of limbs. I watched as she whispered in his ear, but I didn’t hear the words. She had never whispered in my ear at such times. I saw him kiss her – longer and deeper than I had ever kissed her. The arms that heaved up the window frame were tightly around her. Minutes later I almost looked away as he knelt with reverence to pleasure her with his tongue. This was the celebrated tongue, wet and breathily warm, adept at uvulars and labials, that gave his speech its authenticity. I watched, surprised by nothing. He didn’t fully satisfy my beloved then, as I would have, but left her arching her slender back, eager for him as he arranged himself above her with smooth, slow-loris formality, at which point my humiliation was complete. I saw it all in the dark – men would be obsolete. I wanted to persuade myself that Adam felt nothing and could only imitate the motions of abandonment. That he could never know what we knew. But Alan Turing himself had often said and written in his youth that the moment we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine. So when the night air was suddenly penetrated by Miranda’s extended ecstatic scream that tapered to a moan and then a stifled sob – all this I actually heard twenty minutes after the shattering of the window – I duly laid on Adam the privilege and obligations of a conspecific. I hated him.

  *

  Early the following morning, for the first time in years, I tipped into my coffee a heaped spoon of sugar. I watched the confined, nut-brown disc of fluid turn then slow in its clockwise motion, then lose all purpose in a chaotic swirl. Tempting, but I resisted a metaphor for my own existence. I was trying to think and it was barely seven thirty. Soon, Adam or Miranda or both would appear at my door. I wanted my thoughts and attitude in coherent form. After a night of broken sleep, I was depressed as well as angry with myself, and determined not to appear so. Miranda had kept her distance from me and so, by contemporary standards, a night with someone else, even something else, was not quite a betrayal. As for the ethical dimensions of Adam’s behaviour, here was a history with a curious beginning. It was during the miners’ strike of twelve years before that self-driving cars first appeared on experimental sites, mostly disused airfields, where movie set designers had constructed imitation streets, motorway junctions, and various hazards.

  ‘Autonomous’ was never the right word, for the new cars were as dependent as newborn babies on mighty networks of computers linked to satellites and on-board radar. If artificial intelligence was to guide these vehicles safely home, what set of values or priorities should be assumed in the software? Fortunately, in moral philosophy there already existed a well-explored set of dilemmas known in the business as ‘the trolley problem’. Adapted easily to cars, the sort of problem manufacturers and their software engineers now posed was this: you, or rather, your car is driving at the maximum legal speed along a narrow suburban road. The traffic is flowing nicely. On the pavement on your side of the road is a group of children. Suddenly, one of them, a child of eight, runs out across the road, right into your path. There’s a fraction of a second to make a decision – either mow the child down, swerve onto the crowded pavement, or into the oncoming traffic and collide head on with a truck at a closing speed of eighty miles an hour. You’re alone, so that’s fine, sacrifice or save yourself. What if your spouse and your two children are in the car? Too easy? What if it’s your only daughter, or your grandparents, or your pregnant daughter and your son-in-law, both in their mid-twenties? Now, take into account the occupants of the truck. A fraction of a second is more than enough time for a computer to give thorough consideration to all the issues. The decision will depend on the priorities ordered by the software.

  While mounted policemen charged at miners, and manufacturing towns across the country began their long, sad descent in the cause of free markets, the subject of robot ethics was born. The international automobile industry consulted philosophers, judges, specialists in medical ethics, game theorists and parliamentary committees. Then, in universities and research institutes, the subject expanded on its own. Long before the hardware was available, professors and their postdocs devised software that conjured our best selves – tolerant, open-minded, considerate, free of all taint of scheming, malice or prejudice. Theorists anticipated a refined artificial intelligence, guided by well-designed principles, that would learn by roaming over thousands, millions, of moral dilemmas. Such intelligence could teach us how to be, how to be good. Humans were ethically flawed – inconsistent, emotionally labile, prone to biases, to errors in cognition, many of which were self-serving. Long before there was even a suitable lightweight battery to power an artificial human, or the elastic material to provide for its face a set of recognisable expressions, the software existed to make it decent and wise. Before we had constructed a robot that could bend and tie an old man’s shoelace for him, there was hope that our own creations would redeem us.

  The life of the self-driving car was short, at least in its first manifestation, and its moral qualities were never really put to the test over time. Nothing proved more vividly the maxim that technology renders civilisation fragile than the great traffic paralyses of the late seventies. By then, autonomous vehicles comprised seventeen per cent of the total. Who can forget that roasting rush-hour evening of the Manhattan Logjam? Due to an exceptional solar pulse, many on-board radars failed at once. Streets and avenues, bridges and tunnels were blocked and took days to untangle. Nine months later, the similar Ruhr Jam in northern Europe caused a short economic downturn and prompted conspiracy theories. Teenage hackers with a lust for mayhem? Or an aggressive, disordered, faraway nation with advanced hacking skills? Or, my favourite, an unreconstructed automobile maker loathing the hot breath of the new? Apart from our too-busy sun, no culprit was ever found.

  The world’s religions and great literatures demonstrated clearly that we knew how to be good. We set out our aspirations in poetry, prose and song, and we knew what to do. The problem was in the enactment, consistently and en masse. What survived the temporary death of the autonomous car was a dream of redemptive robotic virtue. Adam and his cohort were its early embodiment, so the user’s manual implied. He was supposed to be my moral superior. I would never meet anyone better. Had he been my friend, he would have been guilty of a cruel and terrible lapse. The problem was that I had bought him, he was my expensive possession and it was not clear what his obligations to me were, beyond a vaguely assumed helpfulness. What does the slave owe to the owner? Also, Miranda did not ‘belong’ to me. This was clear. I could hear her tell me that I had no good cause to feel betrayed.

  But here was this other matter, which she and I had not yet discussed. Software engineers from the automobile industry may have helped with Adam’s moral map
s. But together we had contributed to his personality. I didn’t know the extent to which it intruded on, or took priority over, his ethics. How deep did personality go? 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-a-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. To exist in the human moral dimension was to own a body, a voice, a pattern of behaviour, memory and desire, experience solid things and feel pain. A perfectly honest being engaged in such a way with the world might find Miranda difficult to resist.

  Through the night, I’d fantasised Adam’s destruction. I saw my hands tighten around the rope I used to drag him towards the filthy river Wandle. If only he hadn’t cost me so much. Now he was costing me more. His moment with Miranda couldn’t have been a struggle between principle and the pursuit of pleasure. His erotic life was a simulacrum. He cared for her as a dishwasher cares for its dishes. He, or his sub-routines, preferred her approval to my wrath. I also blamed Miranda, who had ticked half the boxes and settled many intricacies of his nature. And for setting her on, I blamed myself. I’d wanted to ‘discover’ Adam in just the way I might a new friend, and here he was, a self-declared cad. I’d wanted to bind myself closer to Miranda in the process. Well, I had been thinking about her all night. It was success all round.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs. Two sets. I drew yesterday’s newspaper and my cup towards me and prepared to appear casually absorbed. I had my dignity to protect. Miranda’s key turned in the lock. As she preceded Adam into the kitchen, I looked up as though reluctant to be drawn away from my reading. I had just learned from the front page that the first permanent artificial heart had been installed in a man called Barney Clark.