“Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions … genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape. “We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world,” Turing says. And how to act when your girlfriend fools around with a humanoid robot - is he a love rival or “bipedal vibrator”? Instead, Adam drives a wedge between them, announcing airily to Charlie, “There’s a possibility … a systematic, malicious liar.” We’re on familiar McEwan turf - hints at discomfiting secrets, corrosive mistrust. The pièce de résistance is the recondite “P versus NP” proof permitting artificial intelligence to jump the rail from “closed system” to everyday life’s “open system.” His technological progeny includes Adam, an “artificial human,” one of 25 models produced worldwide, into which Charlie, a whimsical 30-something washout spends his inheritance - out of “curiosity” but also as a ruse to woo Miranda, his neighbor. McEwan’s Turing blossoms into a world-historical figure whose contributions have galvanized a revved-up technology cycle - “speech-recognition software” in the 1950s “brain-machine interfacing” in the 1960s. That it does so in a story set 37 years ago attests to McEwan’s powers of invention.

The result is a densely allusive, mind-bending novel of ideas that plays to our acute sense of foreboding about where technology is leading us. “In Machines Like Me,” British literary fiction master Ian McEwan posits an alternative history in which Turing’s career wasn’t tragically foreshortened by official bigotry. And in 1954, aged 41, sentenced to “chemical castration” for his relationship with another man, he swallowed cyanide. He also conceptualized the digital computer and anticipated artificial intelligence. Alan Turing played one of the most consequential roles in World War II of anyone not named Hitler, Stalin or Churchill he cracked the cipher encrypting Nazi communications for the Allies.

Book machines like me