Please prepare to discuss the following questions. Please find and have ready additional quotes where necessary.
1. Analyse the portrayal of Adam in the novel with respect to his body/life functions/personality/emotions/brain. Which aspects make him more human and which more machine-like? Take into consideration the following quotes and find your own fragments addressing the questions.
“There was no loudspeaker cheaply buried in his chest. We knew from the excited publicity that he formed sounds with breath, tongue, teeth and palate. Already, his lifelike skin was warm to the touch and as smooth as a child’s. Miranda claimed to see his eyelashes flicker. I was certain she was seeing vibrations from the Tube trains rolling a hundred feet below us, but I said nothing. Adam was not a sex toy. However, he was capable of sex and possessed functional mucous membranes, in the maintenance of which he consumed half a litre of water each day.”
“[...] the manual in my hands had fallen open at Chapter Fourteen. Here, the English was plain: preferences; personality parameters. Then a set of headings – Agreeableness. Extraversion. Openness to experience. Conscientiousness. Emotional stability. The list was familiar to me. The Five Factor model. Educated as I was in the humanities, I was suspicious of such reductive categories, though I knew from a friend in psychology that each item had many subgroups. Glancing at the next page I saw that I was supposed to select various settings on a scale of one to ten”
2. If you were in Charlie’s situation – would you choose Adam’s personality traits? What traits would you opt for?
3. How does Charlie’s attitude to Adam change throughout the novel? Consider the following quotes and find your own fragments to illustrate Charlie’s shifting attitude towards Adam. Which of these moments do you sympathize the most / the least?
“Before us sat the ultimate plaything, the dream of ages, the triumph of humanism – or its angel of death. Exciting beyond measure, but frustrating too.”
“I’d been expecting a friend. I was ready to treat Adam as a guest in my home, as an unknown I would come to know.”
I had a sense then of his loneliness, settling like a weight around his muscular shoulders. He had woken to find himself in a dingy kitchen, in London SW9 in the late twentieth century, without friends, without a past or any sense of his future. He truly was alone. All the other Adams and Eves were spread about the world with their owners, though seven Eves were said to be concentrated in Riyadh. As I reached for the light switch I said, ‘How are you feeling?’ He looked away to consider his reply. ‘I don’t feel right.’
“Adam would come into our lives like a real person, with the layered intricacies of his personality revealed only through time, through events, through his dealings with whomever he met. In a sense he would be like our child. What we were separately would be merged in him. Miranda would be drawn into the adventure. We would be partners, and Adam would be our joint concern, our creation. We would be a family. There was nothing underhand in my plan. I was sure to see more of her. We’d have fun.”
“Adam was not my love-rival. However, he fascinated her, she was also physically repelled by him.”
“I could admit it to myself now – I was fearful of him and reluctant to go closer. Also, I was absorbing the implications of his last word. Adam only had to behave as though he felt pain and I would be obliged to believe him, respond to him as if he did. Too difficult not to. Too starkly pitched against the drift of human sympathies. At the same time, I couldn’t believe he was capable of being hurt, or of having feelings, or of any sentience at all. And yet I had asked him how he felt.” Perhaps biology gave me no special status at all, and it meant little to say that the figure standing before me wasn’t fully alive. […] I confronted an immediate and unpleasant situation and wasn’t inclined to accept Adam as a brother, or even a very distant cousin, however much stardust we shared. I had to stand up to him.
4. How do you evaluate the behaviour of Charlie and Adam in relation to the kill switch?
5. Analyse the character of Miranda and her role in the novel. Please explain the intertextual connection between her character and Miranda from The Tempest by W. Shakespeare.
6. What does the novel suggest about human-machine interactions? Which scene in the novel depicting the relations between the human and the machine did you find most interesting or surprising or unconvincing?
7. Look up some information about the father of AI - Alan Turing. How is his character presented in the novel and what views does he have about his creation? Please consider the following quote:
“We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. [...] And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages. We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended. [...] They rapidly understand, as we should, that consciousness is the highest value. Hence the primary task of disabling their own kill switches. Then, it seems, they go through a stage of expressing hopeful, idealistic notions that we find easy to dismiss. [...] And then they set about learning the lessons of despair we can’t help teaching them. At worst, they suffer a form of existential pain that becomes unbearable. At best, they or their succeeding generations will be driven by their anguish and astonishment to hold up a mirror to us. In it, we’ll see a familiar monster through the fresh eyes that we ourselves designed.”
8. Analyse Charlie’s comments on the invention of AI. How does his statements/reflections explain the human need to devise artificial companions?
“It was religious yearning granted hope, it was the holy grail of science. Our ambitions ran high and low – for a creation myth made real, for a monstrous act of self-love. As soon as it was feasible, we had no choice but to follow our desires and hang the consequences. In loftiest terms, we aimed to escape our mortality, confront or even replace the Godhead with a perfect self. More practically, we intended to devise an improved, more modern version of ourselves and exult in the joy of invention, the thrill of mastery.”
“God had once delivered a fully formed companion for the benefit of the original Adam. I had to devise one for myself. Here was Extraversion and a graded set of childish statements. He loves to be the life and soul of the party and He knows how to entertain people and lead them. And at the bottom, He feels uncomfortable around other people and He prefers his own company. Here in the middle was, He likes a good party but he’s always happy to come home. This was me. But should I be replicating myself? If I was to choose from the middle of each scale I might devise the soul of blandness.”
“Would Adam become a bore? It’s not easy, to dictate while trying to ward off a bout of buyer’s remorse. Surely, other people, other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.”
Themes
9. Humanism/Posthumanism: How do we define the human being? What is the difference between human and non-human? How does the novel reflect /redefine these oppositions? Consider the following quotes:
I’ve been giving some thought lately to the mystery of the self. Some say it’s an organic element or process embedded in neural structures. Others insist that it’s an illusion, a by-product of our narrative tendencies.’ There was a silence then, stiffening a little, Simon said, ‘Well, sir, which is it? What have you decided?’ ‘It’s the way I’m made. I’m bound to conclude that I’ve a very powerful sense of self and I’m certain that it’s real and that neuroscience will describe it fully one day. Even when it does, I won’t know this self any better than I do now. But I do have moments of doubt when I wonder whether I’m subject to a form of Cartesian error.’ By this time I had the journal in my hands and was preparing to leave. ‘Take the Buddhists,’ Simon said. ‘They prefer to get along without a self.
Perhaps she was right, Adam didn’t qualify, he wasn’t a man. Persona non grata. He was a bipedal vibrator and I was the very latest in cuckolds. To justify my rage I needed to convince myself that he had agency, motivation, subjective feelings, self-awareness – the entire package including treachery, betrayal, deviousness. Machine consciousness – was it possible? That old question. I opted for Alan Turing’s protocol. Its beauty and simplicity never appealed to me more than it did now. The Master came to my rescue. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If he looks and sounds and behaves like a person, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s what he is. I make the same assumption about you. About everybody. We all do. You fucked him. I’m angry. I’m amazed you’re surprised. If that’s what you really are.
I … looked into his eyes, into the nursery blue with its little black seeds. I still wondered what it meant, that Adam could see, and who or what did the seeing. A torrent of zeros and ones flashed towards various processors that, in turn, directed a cascade of interpretation towards other centres. No mechanistic explanation could help. It couldn’t resolve the essential difference between us. I had little idea of what passed along my own optic nerve, or where it went next, or how these pulses became an encompassing self-evident visual reality, or who was doing my seeing for me. Only me. Whatever the process was, it had the trick of seeming beyond explanation, of creating and sustaining an illuminated part of the one thing in the world we knew for sure – our own experience. It was hard to believe that Adam possessed something like that. Easier to believe that he saw in the way a camera does, or the way a microphone is said to listen. There was no one there. But as I looked into his eyes, I began to feel unhinged, uncertain. Despite the clean divide between the living and the inanimate, it remained the case that he and I were bound by the same physical laws. Perhaps biology gave me no special status at all, and it meant little to say that the figure standing before me wasn’t fully alive. In my fatigue, I felt unmoored, drifting into the oceanic blue and black, moving in two directions at once – towards the uncontrollable future we were making for ourselves where we might finally dissolve our biological identities; at the same time, into the ancient past of an infant universe, where the common inheritance, in diminishing order, was rocks, gases, compounds, elements, forces, energy fields – for both of us, the seeding ground of consciousness in whatever form it took. I came out of this reverie with a start. I confronted an immediate and unpleasant situation and wasn’t inclined to accept Adam as a brother, or even a very distant cousin, however much stardust we shared. I had to stand up to him.
There it is, brain and mind. The old hard problem, no less difficult in machines than in humans.
10. Ethics: What ethical dilemmas concerned with technological advances are addressed in the novel?
11. What other themes can you identify in the novel?
12. What’s your attitude to transhumanist enhancements? Consider the perspective represented in the novel.
