Free online listen to Machines Like Me audiobook by Ian McEwan and narrated by Steven Crossley . Are you a Ian McEwan fan ? if yes you will love Machines Like Me audiobook. Now lets try to play the audio and leave a comment about this book.
Reviews:
1/Drawing on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, Ian McEwan has created a narrative about a Robot named Adam bought by Charlie Parker, the storie’s narrator, who has always had a interest in technology starting with the building of: ” a radio, with its irregular blobs of solder on a board, appears no less a wonder than consciousness itself arising from matter.” In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing wrote: “We are disposed to make patterns, narratives, when we should be thinking probabilistically if we want to make good choices.”
McEwan’s protagonist, Charlie comments on how the things we buy new, soon become obsolete before we get our money’s worth out of them: “The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.” In contrast, in the novel, Charlie thinks that: “The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.” And as to the past: ” It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.”
Charlie was somewhat perplexed when he learned from the manual that came with Adam, that he was expected to set Adam’s personality as he revealed to the reader that: “a lot of (his) life is lived in the neutral zone, a familiar garden, but a grey one, unremarkable, immediately forgotten, hard to describe.” He remembered that: ” an old friend of his, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.” Charlie, the narrator reasoned that: “There’s a special sensuousness in an unshared bed, at least for a period, until sleeping alone begins to assume its own quiet sadness.” Adam remarks to Charlie: “From a certain point of view, the only solution to suffering would be the complete extinction of humankind.”
“You can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.” – Schopenhauer
2/I didn’t expect to enjoy a book “about machines,” but I am a fan of Ian McEwan, and I was quite intrigued.
3/Machines Like Me is a sci-fi story of a man, Charlie Friend, who purchases an arificial machine “Adam”. He spends his inheritance from his mother on this robotic creature. Along with his upstairs neighbor and lover, Miranda, they program Adam and he becomes part of their lives. Along the way, Adam digs into their lives and exposes some truths about them. Just a bizarre story, and way too much time was spent on their bedroom rituals.
If you are going to read a sci-fi book about AI companions, read Klara and the Sun, which in my opinion is far better.
