Machines Like Me

As Machines Like Me discusses the prospects of personhood, the characters of Mark, Charlie, and Adam come to represent the different ways it can be achieved. Mark and Adam are both in the process of developing personhood, and their differences in learning abilities contribute to the personhoods they establish. Once Adam’s personhood is established, he’s contrasted with Charlie, whose own established, adult personhood is in a state of stagnation as he lacks the ambition to learn more.

By contrasting Mark and Adam, the novel compares machine learning to a human child’s ability to learn through play and inference. Mark can learn how to relate to other humans through accumulated experiences of play in a way that programmers’ codes have yet to replicate. Mark’s personhood is entirely determined by himself, whereas Adam receives a foundational personality from Miranda and Charlie through their personality question selections. Although this personality changes based on Adam’s machine learning and emotional experiences, he nevertheless begins his life with a specific personhood already attached to him, something a human child doesn’t experience. This difference contributes to Adam's inability to anticipate the emotional response Miranda and Charlie have to his turning Miranda in to the Salisbury police for perjury. His machine learning can’t understand that Miranda wouldn’t see the logic in this decision.

The novel then compares Adam’s established personhood to Charlie through their shared love for Miranda. When Adam is receiving a diagnostic update from his manufacturer’s engineers, Charlie notices the lack of differentiation in code when Adam expresses the emotions love and hate. Nevertheless, Adam’s love for Miranda keeps him motivated to live when the other artificial humans are choosing to end their existence to escape human society. Charlie’s personhood is tepid enough that Miranda’s father, Maxfield Blacke, mistakes him for the artificial human, prompting him to wonder if “something deeply regrettable about myself had at last been revealed” (245). This contrast between the ways that Adam and Charlie act on their emotions allows McEwan to discuss the question of personhood in the context of consciousness, inviting contemplation of who is truly alive: Adam, in his enthusiasm for life and love, or Charlie, who has described his own existence as emotionally neutral.

When Mark and Charlie interact, it’s through this lens of developing personhood. Charlie views adopting Mark as a direct threat to his personhood: “I had nothing of my own to defend against a child. His existence would obliterate mine” (270). Because Charlie’s established personhood lacks in ambition or motivation beyond loving Miranda, any perceived demand on this personhood causes him anxiety.

Turing’s paradigm that once a machine can’t be distinguished from a human both in behavior and emotional response, it must be considered in possession of a consciousness implies that establishing personhood depends on a human or machine’s experiences in relation to others. By contrasting the developing and adult forms of personhood between the novel’s male characters, McEwan poses the question of how to regard consciousness and personhood in the context of technological evolution. The answer, given when Turing confronts Charlie in the novel’s final scenes for his abuse of Adam, situates personhood within the realm of possibility for artificial humans.