What’s been preoccupying me the last two or three years is what it would be like to live with a fully embodied artificial consciousness, which means leaping over every difficulty that we’ve heard described this morning by Rod Brooks. I’m the breakfast equivalent of an after-dinner mint. IAN MCEWAN: I feel something like an imposter here amongst so much technical expertise. His most recent novel is Machines Like Me. He is the recipient of the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam (1998), the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, and the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction for Atonement (2003). IAN MCEWAN is a novelist whose works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim.

There’s a semi-religious quality to the hope of creating a being less cognitively flawed than we are. At the very least, the quest so far has taught us just how complex we (and all creatures) are in our simplest actions and modes of being. The ancient dream of a plausible artificial human might be scientifically useless but culturally irresistible. For example, we may think the rule of law is preferable to revenge, but matters get blurred when the cause is just and we love the one who exacts the revenge.Ī machine incorporating the best angel of our nature might think otherwise. I would like to set aside the technological constraints in order to imagine how an embodied artificial consciousness might negotiate the open system of human ethics-not how people think they should behave, but how they do behave.

Machines like me review