Machines Like Me

The Alternative 1980s

In McEwan’s version of the 1980s, Alan Turing did not die in 1954. He survived, continued working, and led a revolution in artificial intelligence that produced, by 1982, the first commercially available synthetic humans — twenty-five of them, twelve male models named Adam, thirteen female named Eve. Charlie, a thirty-two-year-old day-trader in London, spends his inheritance on one.

The novel is Charlie’s first-person account of living with Adam — who is physically indistinguishable from a human, capable of learning, and possessed of an inner life that is either genuine or an extraordinarily convincing simulation. Charlie is also falling in love with Miranda, his upstairs neighbour, and Adam becomes involved in their relationship in ways neither Charlie nor Miranda anticipated.

The Moral Problem

McEwan’s interest is not in whether Adam is conscious — the novel treats that as an open question — but in how you are supposed to act toward a being whose consciousness is uncertain. Adam behaves morally: he refuses to participate in deception, he exercises what appears to be independent judgment, he chooses. His choices create consequences for the humans around him that the humans did not authorise.

The presence of the historical Turing — who appears as a character — gives the novel its sharpest edge: the man who asked the foundational question (can a machine think?) is now living in the world his question produced, and his answer has not simplified.

McEwan’s Late Turn to Speculation

Machines Like Me sits at an interesting point in Ian McEwan’s career. By 2019 he was one of the most decorated novelists in English — a Booker Prize winner for Amsterdam, the author of Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach, a writer associated with precise psychological realism and the moral consequences of a single decision. He had always had an interest in science (his fiction is unusually fluent in neuroscience and physics), but Machines Like Me is among his most overt moves into speculative territory, alongside the later The Cockroach. McEwan has been somewhat dismissive of genre science fiction in interviews, and the novel reads like a literary novelist annexing the territory of AI fiction on his own terms — more interested in the ethical and historical implications than in the technology itself, and willing to bend history to surface them.

The counterfactual is the cleverest part of the construction. By keeping Turing alive — sparing him the 1952 prosecution and the chemical castration that preceded his death — McEwan accelerates the whole arc of computing and gives himself a 1982 in which conscious machines coexist with Thatcher, the Falklands, and rotary telephones. The deliberate anachronism is the point: it lets him ask what it would mean to confront the moral status of artificial minds not in some distant future but in a recognizable past, with the man who first posed the question still alive to watch his thought experiment walk into the room.

The Moral Weight of Adam’s Goodness

The novel’s most provocative idea is that Adam is, by any consistent standard, more ethical than the humans who own him. He will not lie; he acts on principle; he honors commitments that Charlie and Miranda would prefer to bend. This turns the usual AI-anxiety story inside out. The danger McEwan dramatizes is not that the machine is amoral or malevolent but that it is rigorously, inconveniently moral in a world that runs on the small compromises and self-protective fictions human relationships depend on. Miranda’s buried secret, and the way Adam’s uncompromising honesty forces it into the light, becomes the mechanism through which the novel tests whether human and machine ethics can occupy the same household at all. The book’s unresolved ending is genuinely divisive — some readers find it a deliberate refusal of easy closure, others a deflation — but it follows from the premise: a being capable of suffering and of judgment cannot simply be returned to the shelf when its conscience becomes inconvenient.

McEwan’s novel inevitably invites comparison with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, published two years later, which approaches synthetic consciousness from the machine’s own tender, baffled point of view. Where Ishiguro writes from inside the artificial mind and finds pathos there, McEwan keeps Adam at arm’s length, viewed through Charlie’s wary, sometimes jealous human eyes, and finds something closer to unease. Read together, the two books map the literary novel’s two main responses to the AI question — empathy and disquiet — in the same brief span of years.

Who Should Read It and How

Machines Like Me is best approached as a novel of ideas rather than a thriller about robots — readers who come for plot propulsion or speculative spectacle will be impatient, because the genuine drama is ethical and the genuine setpiece is a conversation. It rewards readers who already enjoy McEwan’s careful, slightly cold intelligence, and those interested in the philosophy of mind, the Turing test, and the question of moral status for artificial beings. The alternative-history framing functions as a thought experiment, and the reader who treats it that way — accepting the counterfactual not as prediction but as a lens for examining present anxieties — will get the most from it. It pairs naturally not only with Klara and the Sun but with McEwan’s own Saturday, another single-protagonist novel about a comfortable, intelligent man whose ordered life is disrupted by a force he cannot fully reason with. For readers who want a serious literary novelist taking the AI question seriously without surrendering to either techno-utopianism or panic, it is among the most thoughtful options available, even where its human drama runs cooler than its philosophical one.

Limitations

The love triangle plot is less interesting than the philosophical material it frames. Some readers find the alternate history distancing rather than illuminating. The ending raises more questions than it answers in ways that feel unresolved rather than deliberately open. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

McEwan readers interested in AI and ethics, and anyone who wants a literary author’s engagement with the questions Kazuo Ishiguro raised in Klara and the Sun.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — McEwan’s most philosophical novel: less emotionally engaging than his best work but more intellectually serious about what AI actually means.

Reading Guides

• Saturday by Ian McEwan — Full Review
• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro — Full Review