15 April 2019
This week, Ian McEwan said his new AI novel was not science fiction - and the world went mad. Sarah Ditum looks at why the genre retains its outsider status
Ian McEwan's latest novel, Machines Like Me, is a fiction about science - specifically, artificial intelligence. It is set in an alternative reality where Alan Turing does not kill himself but invents the internet instead; where JFK is never assassinated and Margaret Thatcher's premiership ends with the beginning of the Falklands war. The near future of the real world becomes the present of the novel, giving McEwan the space to explore prescient what-ifs: what if a robot could think like a human, or human intelligence could not tell the difference between itself and AI?
