Ian McEwan talks of man, machine and love in new book

Love, mystery and robots meet in critically-acclaimed author Ian McEwan's new book which also warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.

"Machines Like Me" occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans.

With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever - a love triangle soon forms.

McEwan's subversive new novel, published by Penguin imprint Jonathan Cape, poses fundamental questions: What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart?
On the characters, McEwan says, "Characters in fiction evolve. In a loop, that's hard to describe, they both drive the course of events and are shaped by them. They sometimes surprise their creator. In 'Machines Like Me', the narrator box-ticks his way through to the creation of Adam's personality. Later he learns that Adam comes with all sorts of pre-dispositions, and also, wired-in machine-learning experience that will guide and shape him."
"We don't even have an efficient way yet of storing electricity. Adam can run 17 km in two hours. To propel a 165-pound robot through that distance would need a huge and heavy battery. The human brain, at just over a litre, with perhaps a 100 billion neurons, and an average axon spread to 10,000 synapses firing 10 times a second - and all of it running without overheating on 25 watts - the power of one dim light bulb - what a piece of work!"
He argues that "nature has a more than 3 billion year start on us. But my Adam and Eve will come one day. Perhaps sooner than we think."