![]() ![]() ![]() Actually, in some ways it looks a little more like 2050, if you’ll allow me to speculate: the cars are electric, yes, but also completely autonomous and artificial intelligence and robotics have reached such a stage as to produce robots that are fully convincing as human beings. The result, in brief, is a series of technological breakthroughs that allow 1982 to look a lot like 2019: mobile phones, the internet, laptops, electric cars. On the one hand, Turing’s imprisonment and the rather peaceful isolation it grants him ironically frees him up to tackle some of the most difficult math and physics problems of the early postwar period. ![]() McEwan’s answer is, well, somewhat bewildering. Here’s a head-scratcher: what if Alan Turing, the legendary British mathematician and father of computer science, had chosen imprisonment over chemical castration? This is the central question that drives the alternate history undergirding McEwan’s new novel, Machines Like Me. This robot’s name is Adam, and he is Ian McEwan’s latest, though by no stretch greatest, creation. That’s what an artificially intelligent robot designed in the early ’80s would have you believe, anyway. ![]()
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