‘Virtue gone nuts’: Machine Ethics in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019)

According to a 2016 survey conducted by Müller and Bostrom, 30% of top experts on Artificial Intelligence (AI) expect bad or very bad consequences for humanity, if super-intelligent High/Human-Level Machine Intelligence (HLMI) can be developed. As a counterpoint, machine and robot ethics are being developed in the European Parliament and in international organisations like the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to ensure that AI will benefit mankind. Ian McEwan’s 2019 novel Machines Like Me And People Like You explores the relationship of ethics and embodiment with the model case of the super-intelligent and hyper-realistic robot Adam. Adam has been programmed with Kantian ethics, which is preferred in AI programmes because their abstract rationalism lends itself to algorithmic modelling. The efficacy of these robot and machine ethics is put to the test in the historical life world of the novel with the 1982 Falklands War, the rape of a Muslim girl, and gendered ethics leading to the suicide of the rape victim. The novel exposes that Adam can adhere to the rigourism of disembodied Kantian ethics, but cannot act in a morally adequate way, because he lacks the embodied experience of an ipse-consciousness (Ricoeur), and the existential certainty of personal mortality.