by Ian Mcewan
I wasn’t going to sell Adam, but the ‘malicious liar’ remark rankled. In studying the manual, I’d read about the kill switch. Somewhere on the nape of his neck, just below the hairline, was a mole. If I were to lay a finger on it for three seconds or so, then increase the pressure, he would be powered down. Nothing, no files, memories or skills, would be lost. That first afternoon with Adam I’d been reluctant to touch his neck or any part of him, and held back until late in the day after my successful dinner with Miranda. I’d spent the afternoon at my screen losing £111. I went into the kitchen where the dishes, pots and pans were piled in the sink. As a test of his competence I could have asked Adam to clear up, but I was in a strange, elevated state that day. Everything to do with Miranda glowed, even her nightmare that had woken me in the small hours. The plate I had put before her, the lucky fork that had been in and out of her mouth, the pale bowed shape where her lips had kissed her wine glass were mine alone to handle and cleanse. And so I began.
Behind me, Adam was in place at the table, gazing towards the window. I finished and was drying my hands on a tea towel as I went over to him. Despite my sunny mood, I could not forgive his disloyalty. I didn’t want to hear what else he had to say. There were boundaries of ordinary decency he needed to learn – hardly a challenge for his neural networks. His heuristic shortcomings had encouraged my decision. When I had learned more, when Miranda had done her share, he could come back into our lives.
I kept a friendly tone. ‘Adam, I’m switching you off for a while.’
His head turned towards me, paused, tilted, then tilted the other way. It was some designer’s notion of how consciousness might manifest itself in movement. It would come to irritate me.
He said, ‘With all respect, I think that’s a bad idea.’
‘It’s what I’ve decided.’
‘I’ve been enjoying my thoughts. I was thinking about religion and the afterlife.’
‘Not now.’
‘It occurred to me that those who believe in a life beyond this one will—’
‘That’s enough. Hold still.’ I reached over his shoulder. His breath was warm on my arm, which, I supposed, he could snap with ease. The manual quoted in bold Isaac Asimov’s tirelessly reiterated First Law of Robotics, ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’
I couldn’t find what I wanted by touch. I walked behind Adam and there, as described, right on the hairline was the mole. I put my finger on it.
‘Might we talk about this first?’
‘No.’ I pressed and with the faintest, whirring sigh he slumped. His eyes remained open. I fetched a blanket to cover him up.
In the days that followed this powering-down, two questions preoccupied me: would Miranda fall in love with me? And would French-made Exocet missiles scupper the British fleet when it came within range of Argentinian fighter jets? When I was falling asleep, or in the mornings while I lingered a few seconds in the foggy no-man’s-land between dreaming and waking, the questions merged, the air-to-ship missiles became arrows of love.
What was disarming and curious about Miranda was the ease that settled round her choices, the way she abandoned herself to the flow of events. That evening she came to supper, and after a pleasant two hours eating and drinking, we made love, having closed the bedroom door on Adam. Then we talked into the night. Just as easily, she could have kissed me on the cheek after the chicken with tarragon and retreated upstairs to her own bed and read a history book before falling asleep. What for me was momentous, the immediate, astonishing fulfilment of my hopes, was for her enjoyable and entirely unsurprising, a pleasant extra course after the coffee. Like chocolates. Or a good grappa. Neither my nakedness nor my tenderness had the effect on her that hers, in all their glorious sweetness, had on me. And I was in decent shape – good muscle tone, full head of dark brown hair – and generous, resourceful, some had been kind enough to say. I played a decent hand in pillow talk. She hardly seemed to notice how well we got along, how one topic, one harmless running joke, one mood-tone succeeded another. My self-esteem allowed that this was how it must have been with everyone she had known. I suspected that our first night together barely entered her thoughts the following day.
I could hardly complain when the second night followed the pattern of the first, except that she cooked for me and we slept in her bed, and on the third, in mine – and so on. For all our carefree physical intimacy, I never spoke about my feelings in case I prompted her to admit she had none of her own. I preferred to wait, to let things build, let her feel free until she realised that she wasn’t, that she was in love with me and it was too late to turn back.
There was vanity in this expectation. After a week or so there was anxiety. I’d been glad to switch Adam off. Now, I wondered about reactivating him to ask about his warning, his reasons, his sources. But I couldn’t let a machine have such a hold over me, which was what would happen if I granted it the role of confidant, counsellor, oracle, in my most private affairs. I had my pride and I believed that Miranda was incapable of a malicious lie.
And yet. I despised myself for doing it, but ten days into the affair I began my own investigations. Apart from the much-discussed notion of ‘machine-intuition’, Adam’s only possible source was the Internet. I trawled through the social media sites. There were no accounts under her name. She lived in the reflections of her friends. So there she was, at parties or on holidays, carrying a friend’s daughter on her shoulders at a zoo, gum-booted on a farm, linking arms or dancing or romping in the pool with a succession of bare-chested boyfriends, with boisterous crowds of teenage girlfriends, with drunken undergraduates. All who knew her liked her. No one on any accessible site had a sinister story. Now and then the chatter endorsed parts of the past she was recounting in our midnight conversations. Elsewhere, her name came up in connection with the one academic paper she had published – ‘Pannage in Swyncombe: the role of the half-wild pig in the household economies of a medieval Chilterns village’. When I read it, I loved her more.
As for the intuitive artificial mind, it was pure urban legend, begun in early 1968 when Alan Turing and his brilliant young colleague, Demis Hassabis, devised software to beat one of the world’s great masters of the ancient game of go in five straight games. Everyone in the business knew that such a feat could not be accomplished by number-crunching force. The possible moves in go and chess vastly exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe, and go has exponentially more moves than chess. Go masters are unable to explain how they attain their supremacy beyond a profound sense of what feels right for any given situation on the board. So it was assumed that the computer was doing something similar. Breathless articles in the press announced a new era of humanised software. Computers were on the threshold of thinking like us, imitating our often ill-defined reasons for our judgements and choices. In a counter-move and in a pioneering spirit of open access, Turing and Hassabis put their software online. In media interviews they described the process of machine deep learning and neural networks. Turing attempted layman explanations of the Monte Carlo tree search, an algorithm elaborated during the forties’ Manhattan Project to develop the first atom bomb. He became famously irritable when he attempted, overambitiously, to explain PSPACE-complete mathematics to an impatient television interviewer. Less well known was his loss of temper on an American cable channel as he described a problem central to computer science, P versus NP. He was in front of a combative studio audience of ordinary ‘folk’. He had recently published his solution, which mathematicians around the world were then checking. As a problem it was easy to state, formidably difficult to resolve. Turing was trying to suggest that a correct positive solution would initiate exciting discoveries in biology as well as in concepts of space and time and creativity. The audience did not share or understand his excitement. They had only a dim awareness of his role in the Second World War, or of his influence on their own computer-dependent lives. They
regarded him as the perfect English gentleman egghead and enjoyed tormenting him with stupid questions. The unhappy episode marked the end of his mission to popularise his field.
Before the confrontation with the nine-dan Japanese go master, the Turing–Hassabis computer played thousands of matches against itself continuously for a year. It learned from experience, and it was the scientists’ claim – reasonable enough – to have come a step closer to approximating human general intelligence that gave rise to the legend of machine intuition. Nothing they said could bring the untethered story back to earth.
Commentators who suggested that the computer’s victory would make the game extinct were wrong. After his fifth defeat, the elderly go master, helped by an assistant, stood slowly, bowed towards the laptop and congratulated it in a trembling voice. He said, ‘The mounted horse did not kill athletics. We run for joy.’ He was right. The game, with its simple rules and boundless complexity, became even more popular. As with the post-war defeat of a chess grandmaster, the triumph of the machine could not diminish the game. Winning, it was said, was less important than pleasure in the intricacies of the contest. But the idea that there was now software that could eerily, accurately ‘read’ a situation, or a face, a gesture or the emotional timbre of a remark was never dislodged and partly explained the interest when the Adams and Eves came on the market.
Fifteen years is a long time in computer science. The processing power and sophistication of my Adam was far greater than the go computer. The technology advanced and Turing moved on. He spent concentrated time looking at decision-making and wrote a celebrated book: we are disposed to make patterns, narratives, when we should be thinking probabilistically if we want to make good choices. Artificial intelligence could improve on what we had, on what we were. Turing devised the algorithms. All his innovative work was available to others. Adam must have benefited.
Turing’s institute drove forward AI and computational biology. He said he wasn’t interested in becoming richer than he already was. Hundreds of prominent scientists followed his example on open-source publication which would lead, in 1987, to the collapse of the journals Nature and Science. He was much criticised for that. Others said that his work had created tens of thousands of jobs around the world in diverse fields – computer graphics, medical scanning devices, particle accelerators, protein folding, smart electricity distribution, defence, space exploration. No one could guess the end of such a list.
By living openly from 1969 with his lover, Tom Reah, the theoretical physicist who would win the Nobel Prize in 1989, Turing helped give weight to a gathering social revolution. When the AIDS epidemic broke out he raised a huge sum to set up a virology institute in Dundee and was co-founder of a hospice. After the first effective treatments appeared, he campaigned for short licences and low prices, especially in Africa. He continued to collaborate with Hassabis, who had run his own group since 1972. Turing gradually lost patience with public engagements, so he said, and preferred to concentrate on his work in ‘my shrinking years’. Behind him were his long residency in San Francisco, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a banquet in his honour with President Carter, lunch with Mrs Thatcher at Chequers to discuss science funding, dinner with the President of Brazil to persuade him to protect the Amazon. For a long while, he was the face of the computer revolution, and the voice of the new genetics, almost as famous as Stephen Hawking. Now he was a near-recluse. His only journeys were between his house in Camden Town and his Institute in King’s Cross, two doors down from the Hassabis Centre.
Reah wrote a long poem about his and Turing’s life together, published in the TLS and then in book form. The poet and critic Ian Hamilton said in a review, ‘Here is a physicist who can imagine as well as scan. Now bring me the poet who can explain quantum gravity.’ When Adam appeared in my life, I believed that only a poet, not a machine, could tell me if Miranda would ever love me, or lie to me.
*
There must have been Turing algorithms buried in the software of the Exocet series 8 missiles that a French company, MBDA, had sold to the Argentine government. This fearsome weapon, once fired from a jet in the general direction of a ship, could recognise its profile and decide mid-flight whether it was hostile or friendly. If the latter, it aborted its mission and plunged harmlessly into the sea. If it missed its target and overshot, it was able to double back and make two more attempts. It closed on its prey at 5,000 miles an hour. Its opt-out capacity was probably based on face-recognition software that Turing developed in the mid-sixties. He had been looking for ways to help people with prosopagnosia, a condition in which sufferers are unable to recognise familiar faces. Government immigration control, defence companies and security firms raided the work for their own purposes.
Since France was a NATO partner, strong representations were made to the Elysée Palace by our government that MBDA should be prevented from selling more Exocets or from providing technical assistance. A consignment bound for Peru, Argentina’s ally, was blocked. But other countries, including Iran, were willing to sell. There was also a black market. British agents, posing as arms dealers, bought up the supply.
But the spirit of the free market was irrepressible. The Argentinian military desperately needed help with the Exocet software, which had not been fully installed by the time the conflict began. Two Israeli experts, acting on their own, presumably on the offer of huge financial reward, flew to Argentina. It was never discovered who cut their throats in a Buenos Aires hotel. Many assumed it was British intelligence agents. If so, they were too late. On the day the young Israelis bled to death in their beds, four British ships were sunk, the next day another three went down, and on the third, another. In all, an aircraft carrier, destroyers, frigates and a troop carrier were sunk. The loss of life was in the low thousands. Sailors, troops, cooks, doctors and nurses, journalists. After days of confusion, with all military efforts concentrated on rescuing survivors, the rump of the Task Force turned back and the Falkland Islands became Las Malvinas. The fascist junta that ruled Argentina was jubilant, its popularity soared, its murder, torture and disappearances of its citizens were forgotten or forgiven. Its hold on power was consolidated.
I watched it all, horrified – and guilty. Having thrilled to the sight of the warships filing down the English Channel, despite my opposition to the venture, I was implicated, along with nearly everyone else. Mrs Thatcher came out of 10 Downing Street to make a statement. First she couldn’t speak, then she was tearful, but refused to be helped back inside. Finally, she recovered and, in an untypically small voice, made the famous ‘I take it on my shoulders’ speech. She assumed full responsibility. She would never outlive the shame. She offered her resignation. But the shock to the nation of so many deaths was profound and there was no appetite for heads to roll. If she had to go, so did her entire cabinet, and most of the country. A leader in the Telegraph put it thus: ‘The failure belongs to us all. This is not the occasion for scapegoats.’ A very British process began, reminiscent of the Dunkirk disaster, by which a terrible defeat was transformed into a mournful victory. National unity was all. Six weeks later, 1.5 million people were in Portsmouth to greet the returning ships with their cargoes of corpses, their burned and traumatised passengers. The rest of us watched it on television in horror.
I repeat this well-known history for the benefit of younger readers who won’t be aware of its emotional impact, and because it formed a melancholy background to our three-cornered household. The rent was due and I was concerned by a loss of income. There was no mass purchase of hand-held Union Jacks, champagne consumption was down, and the general economy was in trouble, though pubs and hamburgers went on as before. Miranda was lost to her father’s illness and to the Corn Laws and the historical viciousness of vested interests, their indifference to suffering. Meanwhile, Adam remained under the blanket. Miranda’s delay in starting work on him was in part due to technophobia, if that’s the word for disliking being online and ticking boxes with a mouse. I na
gged, and finally she agreed to make a start. A week after the remains of the Task Force returned to port, I set up the laptop on the kitchen table and brought up Adam’s site. It wasn’t necessary to wake him for her to begin. She picked up the cordless mouse, turned it over and stared at its underside with distaste. I made her coffee and went into the bedroom to work.
My portfolio had halved in value. I was supposed to be recouping losses. But the thought of her next door was a distraction. As so often in the mornings, I dwelt on our night before. The misery enveloping the country had made it all the more intense. Then we had talked. She described at length her childhood, an idyll shattered by her mother’s death when she was eight. She wanted to take me to Salisbury and show me the important locations. I took this as a sign of progress but she had yet to suggest a date, and she hadn’t said that she wanted me to meet her father.
I was facing my screen without seeing it. The walls and especially the door were thin. She was making very slow progress. At long intervals, I made out a deliberate click as she registered a choice. The silence between made me tense. Open to experience? Conscientious? Emotionally stable? After an hour I was getting nowhere and decided to go out. I kissed the top of her head as I squeezed past her chair. I left the house and set off towards Clapham.
It was unusually hot for April. The traffic down Clapham High Street was heavy, the pavements were crowded. Everywhere, black ribbons. The idea had crossed from the United States. On lamp posts and doors, in shop windows, on car door handles and aerials, on pushchairs, wheelchairs and bikes. In central London, on official buildings where Union Jacks were at half mast, black ribbons dangled from the flag poles for the 2,920 dead. Black ribbons were worn as armbands and on lapels – I was wearing one myself and so was Miranda. I would find one for Adam. Women and girls and flamboyant men tied them in their hair. The passionate minority who had argued and marched against the invasion wore them too. For public figures, and celebrities, including the royal family, it was hazardous not to wear one – the popular press was keeping watch.
