Scarica "Machines Like Me" Review e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! “MACHINES LIKE ME” - review - by Alicia Meteke Key details: TITLE: “Machines like me” AUTHOR: Ian McEwan PUBLISHER: Jonathan Cape YEAR OF PUBLICATION: April 16, 2019 NUMBER OF PAGES: 320 GENRE: Science Fiction, Romance, Psychological Fiction, Dystopian Novel This summer I read this book and I was so fascinated by the plot that I heave read it on only three days. “Machines Like Me” is a dystopian novel which takes place in the near past, more specifically in 1982. The more remarkable difference between the novel’s past and the past that really took place in our history is that Alan Turing (the scientist who theorised the arrival of the first Artificial Intelligence) isn’t dead and that he accomplished to create the first Artificial Intelligence that also won the men at chess. In 1982 12 Adams and 13 Eves are placed on the market: they are the first androids with “plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression” as Ian McEwan says in the first chapter. Charlie Friend is a 32 years old men who as always been fascinated with physics and science, at first he wants to buy an Eve with the money that he received with an inheritance but at the time he made his purchase they were all sold-out so he bought an Adam. Charlie asks his neighbour Miranda Blacke to help him with the setup of Adam and very soon a love story blooms between them. The couple takes a few days to complete Adam’s setup and when they do finish it Adam is ready to enter their life. The cohabitation with Adam isn’t that simple as Charlie first thought; Charlie wanted Adam to be a “companion, an intellectual sparring partner, friend and factotum who could wash dishes, make beds and ‘think’” and for the first days everything went well, but one night he and Miranda had a fight and the girl slept whit Adam and made love to him. In Charlie’s eyes that night signs a breaking point with the kind of relationship that he was trying to build whit Adam because, as he says in the first chapter, “Adam was not a sex toy. However, he was capable of sex and possessed functional mucous membranes, in the maintenance of which he consumed half a litre of water each day.”. Charlie gets even more worried when Adam explicitly tells him that his terribly in love with his girlfriend Miranda. The book is a deep reflection on the ethical question “What does makes us really human?”. In fact if we take in consideration Adam, in the novel is the best described character and even if he is not a real human been, he is able to have emotions and he also falls in love with Miranda. So if a robot can replicate human feelings and emotions and also human movements and consciousness what does distinguishes us from a mere replication of a human body such as an android? I totally recommend this book to all those who love reading science fiction and dystopian novels because Ian McEwan managed to merge the two genres in a story that intertwines also with the love story and the mysterious past of the characters. My favourite part was when Charlie and Miranda had to face the complicated setup of Adam’s emotions and personality. “I would fill in roughly half the choices for Adam’s personality, then give her the link and the password and let her choose the rest. I wouldn’t interfere, I wouldn’t even want to know what decisions she had made. She might be influenced by a version of herself: delightful. She might conjure the man of her dreams: instructive. Adam would come into our
