Ian McEwan | Machines Like Me

good evening everybody and welcome to strand my name is sabirah and i direct events here at strand for a little bit of history strand was founded in 1927 by the bass family over on 4th avenues book row stretching from Union Square to Astor Place book Row gradually dwindled until after over 91 years strand is the sole survivor still run by the bass family and still housing new and used books tonight we are incredibly excited to welcome Ian McEwan to discuss his brand new novel machines like me ian is the best-selling household name behind 17 books including the novels atonement winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the WH Smith literary award Amsterdam winner of the Booker Prize and the child in time winner of the white bread award as well as several short story collections machines like me finds him turning his attention to the pressing questions of artificial intelligence and machine learning even as he turns back the clock to the 1980s albeit a 1980s in which Thatcher struggles to maintain power and Alan Turing is still alive we're thrilled to have in here to discuss his new book with John Grisham a fellow best-selling author of 32 novels one work of dawn fiction a collection of stories and six novels for young readers so without further ado please join me in welcoming John Grisham and Ian McEwan to strands [Applause] testing which works receiving thank you and thank you guys for being here I've just learned a moment ago that I'm supposed to be the moderator tonight it's your book tour and so I'm supposed to I think take charge and the conversation and talk about this book you've written that sound okay I mean there's no format obviously we're not prepared we have no we have no script and we'll go off script right now what we'll do is ramble for a few moments and talk about books and writing and the current book and if we get bored we'll just take what I'll wear the wrong chairs [Laughter] it looks like fun what does he have two mics lapel and but do I need to speak into it yes yes okay so welcome to the US thank you welcome back thank you you've been here before I've been to the stream many times as a customer it's a great old bookstore and I've been coming here for many years to buy books did a function here a few years ago I can't recall what it was but it was a great success and you know we're talking earlier about touring and how much fun it is to to be able to tour and primarily to go to great bookstores and upended bookstores and you're leaving tomorrow for your tour to go west yep way my wife and I will be in Denver tomorrow morning and we'll be at the Tattered Cover I have been there in 20 years then on to San Diego San Francisco Seattle rest stop in Vancouver we'll do some hiking and then Toronto and then home so a lightweight - a fire that's pretty light and by American standards so how much touring do you do in the UK very little it's much smaller as you might have heard and and getting smaller yeah well it's thought with all of the exiting you know it's breaking apart and I can tell you and that's a whole other story you can do everything from London but yeah I make sorties out to you know we've just come from Glasgow and Edinburgh no sorts in Andrews near Edinburgh so far it's been fun I mean it it's been events like these rather than heavy media stuff because I did all that in the UK for the states before we set off so it's an ideal kind of tour where it's mostly events you're just sitting talking having conversations like this so me this is a whole lot more fun than going to a bigger venue that's not in the store where you go to sell tickets and yeah maybe you know 500 people or whatever it's not a rockstar tour like you know Michelle Obama another writer but it's just it's just you know a couple guys like us who sell a few books just so we draw you know nice crowds but I'd much rather be in a book store with a very intimate setting yeah I agree although you know sometimes those big events have a kind of edge to them you know if it's two and a half thousand people that you feel just a little pulse of being on slightly less relaxed but it could be useful sometimes to be less we're like the worst thing though is to just when you think you need a glass of red wine at the end of the event you go to meet a couple of thousand people who all want a selfie it's the age of the so few years ago when I I toured a little bit I would go to the same five bookstores in Mississippi these are five friends of mine who helped me with my first novel and because a lot of stores said no and so I would pick these five stores every year and we'd go in there lining the signings would last for a long time it's not a lot of books and and that was gratifying and Ollie but I kind of got tired of it and over time I stopped doing the signings and didn't really miss that then I started again a few years ago to go to see bookstores to meet I think it's important for us to get out and meet the fans meet you guys meet the people who are buying the books and people who are selling the books and so that's why I'm touring again back to Michelle Obama I mean if you if you're in front of 40,000 people and you're the writer what do you say I mean it's kind of a rock star the same speech every night I have no idea but I know she did a huge venue in the east of London the o2 and overwhelmingly the audience was comprised teenage girls of original Caribbean descent usually from I don't know how they arranged this but from fairly disadvantaged schools and it was like a rock concert these girls truly inspired I mean they a couple of friends who went and said they were in tears from what how motivational how she stood them up to be ambitious and so that that's a whole other world from you and me the rock star thing yeah you know we come out after a year or two three of Solitude blinking into the light like like moles well two or three years for you yeah I'm a bit quicker than two or three years I always think of it as more or less a degree course you find out things you live with it all it's Falls and Rises and longers and moments of what I call hesitation I never would think of using the term writing blog and the process especially I don't know how you feel about this when you hit the last third when you have learned how to write this book won't teach you how to write any other book any book in the future but you've learned the language that's appropriate to this book the characters the general kind of drift that makes you an expert in this one thing and that lasts where you know you're going to end up for me is one of the pleasures real pleasures of writing starting is much more time of hesitation for me of wondering whether I really want to be doing this whether I really want to do this degree course and not some other but once you've passed that line I reckon for me it's usually about fifty sixty thousand words all doubts you are thoroughly committed and you know that you're the only person who can write this book however bad it is it's yours you know and only you can finish it that's the nicest bit of writing for me one thing I admire about your books and I've been a fan I guess since early nineties what year was atonement 90 2001 what year was Amsterdam 90 go now you've got me down yeah I've written - meow - yeah late 90s anyway okay what I admire is your efficiency with words and plot but also the length of your manuscripts you don't turn in thick books you don't turn in big books and and once you reach a certain level where we are you can write anything you want to write you can write as much as you want to write and the temptation is no one's gonna tell us you know cut it no one's gonna say okay you're you have a limit of word limit no but no one's gonna tell us how long the book can be and because of that because of that freedom so many popular authors say way too much use far too many words and they're hard to read but you you have not succumbed to that temptation well there's a literary form I adore and that is a novella and some of my favorite works of fiction are in that form and it seems to when we think of the great writers at Thomas Mann Kafka Conrad Henry James they've all performed beautifully in the form of say less than forty thousand words it places special demands on a writer the rapidity of establishing things running maybe two subplots rather than ten so that's one half of my writing career has been attending to those it's a service to the reader too because you can read a novella in one or two sittings and it's probably the only time in a first reading when you could actually appreciate the architecture over novel you don't get the feel of a the structure of a novel of great length until the second reading my feeling is then the other half of me is writing at about somewhere between 95 and a hundred and thirty thousand words so that's about you know three hundred twenty pages there and my habits are really to reduce to pare away my second drafts are shorter than my first and the third shorter than the second there's a kind of ghost that sits on my shoulder constantly scowling and saying you don't need that you're never getting away with that come on come off it so I like the economy in that sense so the first draft is going to be a 125 or so the second draft is a complete what not a complete rewrite but a pretty serious cut down to 100 not that much probably lose five or ten thousand words a draft yeah the third draft know what it takes you three years to write a book yeah you write it three times if I wrote the six draw first I could do it in six months that's what I do yeah so four machines your latest what was the final word count it comes out about 9,800 just about a hundred thousand words son if you go to when you say a hundred thousand words in Europe they go by characters and 100 thousand words means nothing and when they say characters they also mean the spaces between words - so I get might get an email from a French newspaper saying we will you write a book we write something with 7,000 characters now even you have not written a novel of 7,000 characters or a first chapter yeah yeah that's that's a lot of characters to keep hold of so yeah I think machines like me comes out roundabout hundred thousand that's amazing because when I read the book a hundred thousand is my goal every time and my books are a little bit thicker than yours I don't say it as a matter of pride I'd love to cut out a lot of it and I'm constantly cutting but I would say your your books are less than a hundred thousand work I mean are you conscious of words I never counted words until I got this software yeah that counts it for you in the bottom left-hand corner you always know how many words you have in your novel and after you know eight years of that you kind of keep up with where you are yeah I always counted pages sometimes you in the middle of a novel you need a sense of progress and all you've got is that word count but sometimes the very first thing I write about a novel that's still a hazy set of disconnected thoughts it's something like 8 by 10 I know I'm going to have ten chapters of roughly 8,000 words that's one of the first things I do and it's amazing how its self-fulfilling one writes to that pattern so for example when I wrote on chesil beach I just had down five by eight it's a short novel eight thousand words and that shapes the rhythm of each chapter and gives me that sense of the structure which i think is great service to a reader that sense of what shape a book takes as I say it's really hard and you can't get the shape of Anna Karenina till you've read it two or three times but if you read the heart of darkness or death in Venice that shape is right there for you immediately so you are by the way your chapters are far too long in machines I come back to page 30 and I said well we finally finally at the end of a chapter it's about time so do you do you use chapter breaks to build suspense to keep it going but within the chapter I use double paragraph space with a little marker little asterisk in the printed version so these are subchapters so really a novel like this breaks down into units of three or four thousand words four thousand three or four thousand so I feel that's a good reading block you know twenty minutes maybe and a chapter would be three of those but it varies I mean obviously with each novel but those structures are to me extremely important yeah I mean yes but you know I worry about a bit accused of everything okay you know cranking out formulas and whatever and so I always worry about how long the chapters should be how much dialogue to use when to do the breaks because you want you know my books are obviously there's its suspense the pace is faster you spend a lot more time with you know things you like to explore and that's what we love about your books because you have this curiosity that is endless okay so you can you can take your time stop and explore music food whatever travel and you do that then you do it beautifully I get bored with that I like to keep moving forward yeah yeah yeah and so when I start writing if I'm running suspense you know I have a good outline of where I'm going and I know what the ending is which is my question to you I was in Toronto two months ago with John Irving and he supposedly said that he writes the last sentence before he writes the first well I'm not that smart but I do know the last scene before I write the first scene mmm what's your process I generally know where I'm heading and I know yeah more or less what does that last scene will be and in this case in this novel I knew that my narrator would end up in a crucial confrontation with Alan Turing the great computer scientist and code breaker the Second World War but generally my feeling about novels in as a form is that it's a kind of journey and I know where I'm heading but I don't know what's going to happen along the way and the thing I hope for are surprises that I will know something at midday that I didn't know at 9:00 in the morning and along the way there'll be a pursuit of what I think of as freedom for example in this novel I send my character on a walk he leaves the house I used to live in this area where the novel is set way back in my 20s and he goes to walk on a big flat park called Clapham Common and I just wanted him to get away from the scene he's unwrapped his robot has come to live and take part in his life fall in love with his girlfriend he wants to leave the house he crosses that common and as he crossed it I suddenly had a memory of when I was walking in that same common and I think this happened to quite a lot of people there was a little children's park and there was a mother there clearly a very reduced circumstances and she was giving a very hearty beating to a child who was really young I mean a toddler there's a special ring of protection that goes around parents it's certain to jump inside that ring really to you you have to you draw breath I drew breath before it the next thing I knew I climbed over this very low fence around this swing park and even though my own voice sounded stupid in my ears I said excuse me excuse me stop beating your child yeah in effect and I said you cannot possibly treat a child like that and she let loose an incredible string of invective and then she stormed away so suddenly I thought I have to have this scene so I wrote it slightly differently within this case I inserted a father of the child and a face of right there was with late in the morning I thought I need this child this child is gonna play a crucial part of the novel it opens out an extraordinary opportunity for me because any robot is going to be completely baffled by the colossal learning Cape has capacities of a four-year-old child so I aged the child up a bit I wanted him to have full language and indeed I didn't even then know exactly what I was going to use that child for but I knew that at some scene a few chapters later he would stumble into the story and that's what I mean about the surprises you know where you're heading but along the way you're looking for opportunities to feed into the process and I think that's one of the I don't think writers talk enough about the pleasures of writing a novel and they talk about their struggles it's worth saying that the pleasure principle is is a very powerful motivating force for you to yeah back to that scene it's one of my favorite scenes in the book when he sticks his nose into another family's business the mother is spanking the child too much he tells her to stop she unloads with you know the language and looks up and here comes the father who's a guy you don't mess with you know he's a big burly guy and they go back and forth and back and forth and the father finally says you do a raise his child you will just kid take him and our hero says okay and he took the child yeah he calls his bluff but then to his immense relief after they've gone about ten steps he's already thinking what am i doing leading this child by the hand you know my life for the next well I always say the first 55 years of the hardest and child-raising to his immense relief the mother is running at him and takes a swing at him and takes the child back but that's not the end of the child and he will play a crucial part because an artificial consciousness might have some difficulty understanding a child at play or the nature of dance or the envy able speed with which child with a blossoming general intelligence can learn I mean even with deep learning there's nothing quite so miraculous as a child blossoming into language so oh you're a grandparent so you knew about this so now we're in the novel which I was trying to put off for a while it's about a robot an Android and all about artificial intelligence and our hero well our robotic atom is purchased by Charlie and comes to live with Charlie and basically his girlfriend Miriam Miranda the other the other girl's mirror Miranda she's cooler and she's right I got those names confused which is something you'd watch for in the future so why in the where did this idea come from well you've always had a fascination for AI yeah yeah and you've read about it before was it just time to write this novel it was in a way cuz AI ever since the late 40s when Alan Turing I mean remember that Alan Turing committed suicide and I'm 54 so for the purposes of this novel he lives on which is not the only screw up with history didn't put in as know there are many scripts with history I thought I'd import into this one of the oldest plots which is a three-cornered love affair so Adam falls in love with Miranda who lives upstairs these these are very cheap low low rent apartments in South London and they have what my friend Christopher Jones used to call a night of shame Adam and Miranda and it's all heard through the very thin floor by Charlie in the narrator and the reason I wrote that scene is because I wanted the Rao afterwards the Rao afterwards is the crucial discussion because Charlie has no right to feel betrayed if Adam is just a machine if he's just a kind of bipedal vibrator as Miranda points out to him that he is then he's not a old if we're going to grant to this realistic human sentience subjective life or consciousness then he has every right to film that he's been betrayed and that even he's having that argument he's rather proud that he's having the most modern conversation conceivable he might be the first man to be cuckold by an artificial man yeah so that Rao was something I didn't even want to plan it until I got into it sometimes there are dialogue scenes do you find this you just want to write them without notes without pre-planning just to see where they will go so this was important and in fact that Rao is interrupted by the arrival of that child that I spoke on yeah one thing you do you've always done with your books is explore in detail different things that obviously fascinate you whether it's music we have music and in this book or the Beatles are reunited in 1982 again the history is all screwed up it's a mess but anyway you might wish they went United was terrible you write about oh the one my favorite scenes in the children act when the judge goes to the hospital to visit the patient and he has a violin and he starts playing a song and she sings with him in the hospital room it's a beautiful scene I love the scene in Saturday the one the early scenes where our hero I can't remember his name is talking about to his teenage son about jazz and jazz guitar yeah and I think also it was in Amsterdam where one of our main characters was writing a symphony but you really know music what does that come from what I love it I'm not a great player of it I used to play the classical flute and that fell away I never get my tone career change by the way yeah so I gave up my day job as a florist I guess it's just part of the the fabric of my existence I can't keep it out it's dangerous I think because what you might think is the most earth-shattering beautiful piece of music to your reader is it might not have the same significance so trying to use music as a sort of an instant button for an emotional response from your reader is a huge mistake so I you mentioned further back on chesil beach young man who loves rock and roll it's 1962 and it's the music of Chuck Berry that that he adores where he's married a young woman who is the first violinist in a classical string quartet they try hard to understand each other's music for him classical music just sounds like so much as he says prim agitation and for her she listens to Chuck Berry and she cannot understand why a song that's in simple 4/4 rhythm needs a drum to beat out the time it just seems childish are you stupid and that mutual comprehension is really part of the problems of a marriage that's only gonna last six hours so I like the music to be I use a pun intended I use the music instrumentally it's got to have some function it's gotta be somehow in the warp and woof of a character and because I know that you know music that you might love will mean nothing to me and vice versa another topic that you handle very deftly and beautifully and I think you secretly really enjoy this is how should we say domestic uncivil T's in civilities problems in a marriage you really know how to describe that I think back to the opening scene of the children act with a judge is you know having a confrontation with her husband of many years and he's really ticked off because they haven't been you know doing much in the bed and they have no children and he wants to have an affair with a 28 year old girl in his office and he asked her if he can do that but seeing terrified me because I could just see myself asking my wife that and it would still scare me yeah the problem of turning your own novels into screenplays when you say this guy I see Stanley Tucci and I've sort of half forgotten they're not all they've blended my screenplay and the but yeah I think that the novelists through the last two or three centuries have made the marital or the affair or the love affair really the field of play of human relationships in in other words it's a microcosm in which we can examine up close the close relationship and of course being novelists we're interested in things going wrong I mean in Anna Karenina which I've mentioned before there are a hundred and seventy-five pages of marital bliss Levin and Kitty and that's probably the longest stretch of marital happiness in fiction and it's only Tolstoy his genius that makes it so interesting and we know also as soon as a visitor arrives things go a bit awry so novelists are drawn to human misunderstanding conflicts and the love affair the marriage is an arena I think for examining the turf as it were of things that go wrong not only between man and wife but between nations I mean in other words it's the perfect sort of small place to look at the detail of how difficult it is sometimes to understand each other yeah I think that from homer onwards do you remember when Odysseus comes home after being away for so long and of course he's not looking quite as young and spruce as he did when he left it occur and Penelope doesn't recognise him and he gets in a sulk and she sets him that famous test of the wedding bed and they have a marital TIFF and this is a marital TIFF that's 2700 years old and it's civilization is entirely remote from ours no technology at all its manners and customs so completely different from ours and yet we can understand when Penelope begs forgiveness said please forgive me I didn't know who you were I thought you might be just one more suitor and they finally make it up and he's grumpy but he comes around and I think whenever I see that read that scene and I think how marvelous that we that human nature itself is a constant through cultural change civilizational change and those tips are so much fun to write about because when you actually see one which is not very often yeah you see a couple having a serious problem obviously in public because you witness it you feel like sort of a voyeur you're watching people like almost like a mu sex yeah they're fighting in public and nobody ever does that but it's really fascinating yeah the trick that Charlie learns in having this role and he says it's taken him years to learn when you're having a marital realm you don't necessarily respond to the last thing said and if you're after a loud aggressive rhetorical question you're a fool to answer it what you must do is shift ground what he calls a knight's move and he said it's a technique that men are slow to learn actually they think that there's a question you ought to answer it and then then come back but on on the same terms but you need to constantly in America rail shift your ground be agile not from experience all right so a little bit get it straight in in this book it's 1982 The Beatles have reunited linen is alive John was alive they produced an album is not very well received the Falklands island of war happens in 1982 and the British lose to the Argentinians because of this Thatcher is embarrassed humiliated and she's defeated the a bomb was never dropped by the Americans on Japan Kennedy's survived the assassination of Tim Alan Turing is alive and leading the computer revolution okay why did you want to screw around so much with history it's so tempting and it was it was all I could do to keep this in the background I thought I'm having too much fun too much mischief here and I did pare it back to come back to an earlier question I've often thought that the present the one we're in now is one of the most improbable unpredictable unforeseen ball constructs you can imagine and there are so many small things that could have led to different outcomes you could have a different president we could leave the EU or not leave it and ten years down the line that the present we're in is overwhelmingly self-evident but the future we're so hopeless predicting the future that we collectively make we didn't predict the internet we didn't even predict cell phones or the effect that the two together might have on our lives even when we had everything together in the late 90s for the internet we didn't dream of social media and when we did we thought it would be liberating it would bring us citizen journalism we never thought of the dark side where hostile nations might interfere in the democratic processes of other nations so it's just small chances that Britain actually managed to get the Falkland Islands back off the Argentinians sending a navy a military force 10,000 8,000 miles to the South Atlantic very very dodgy and if the Argentinians had just found the French engineers who could have primed their air to ship missiles that task force would have been sitting ducks our political realities would have been massively transformed mrs. Thatcher would not have lasted the upside of that of course is the Argentinian fascist quinta was rapidly fell apart and Argentina became a democracy Christopher Hitchens I must mention him again was my only friend who was for this invasion he came from a military family like I did but he was always up for a fight even as we we know to our cost in Iraq the British love war almost as much as we do ya know we we used to think we were quite good at it but the this tiny little pivots that could send us into a different political social reality and I've often thought how extraordinary and by chance what strange chance it was that the Industrial Revolution should take place in the North Midlands in England in the 18th century it could easily have been in China or somewhere else in another century and so the technology we have at any given time was never for ordained that we are where we are with what we've got it is impossible to predict it would have been impossible to predict and could so easily you've been other so even though an atom is a completely impossible thing for us to have now when we don't even have a decent battery to run a robot let alone equate the human brain 100 billion neurons roughly 7,000 axons on average to each neuron the whole thing liquid-cooled sitting inside a liter never overheats runs on 25 watts like a very dim one of those light bulbs we're so far from that now so little in 1982 but still that technology AI is now beginning to invade our lives we just we just got our finger on the top of this pie and we're just beginning to press and again we can't stop ourselves even if we wanted to in the United States it will be done in China or somewhere else and whole economies are going to be organized by it we're about to fill our streets with autonomous automobiles we're already discussing to what extent they should favor drivers over pedestrians in other words we're just on the edge of handing over ethical decisions to a computer in an emergency that's a very very big step for us to take and I like to think that dotted around the campuses of the United States are philosophers who will suddenly be sitting around the table as I read this is happening with car manufacturers moral philosophers telling car manufacturers how to make decisions on our behalf via computers we've already had two terrible accidents confrontations with AI ten thousand meters above the ground with the Boeing 737 max AIDS there's a brain that decides like how in 2001 that makes a decision that the plane is stalling when it's not a five-year-old could tell you it's looking out the window to is not stalling that brain decided it was and almost 400 people have lost their lives in an early confrontation with AI so it's really honest now nowhere near you know a creature like Adam but in mainframes laptops even in the things we carry around with us AI is already functioning in our lives it's it's gonna be huge I think civilizational as it were and we're gonna face people being put out of work that's already happening that which is why I have one of my politicians in the novel say we can have to start taxing robots they're gonna have to start paying for the workers they displace and taxing robots means taxing their owners of course it's gonna be enormous white-collar jobs doctors lawyers even as well as you know manual jobs will start to disappear and should we then just have a universal wage or should we face the social unrest of having 30 percent forty percent of the population unemployed it's a big decision it's really moving towards us and there's no dodging it we can't escape our own ingenuity but whether we flounder in the face of it this is a kind of open question do you obviously publishing now to it now do you have an idea for the next book for D take some time off or do you yeah I'm I'm very good at not writing I'm better at not writing even than the writing night so my head is empty I took a I to three hours to myself yesterday in front of a blank sheet and I thought actually all I want to do is read a novel someone else who's a book and I read a lot of nonfiction so I'm in that receptive state and I rather like that I just need to become a slightly different person before something begins to do well up so they're waving in me that we need to turn it over to the audience and to to you guys if you have any questions raise your hand well I'll repeat the question yes sir right here the question is about Alan Turing and wind and ian began to first focus on Alan Turing so I wrote a film television television a drama called the imitation game title drawn from Alan Turing not to be confused of a recent movie of that name in the late 70s and in it had conversations about whether a machine could think so the reason then was all of that information about Turing's code-breaking had just been Declassified it was Official Secrets up until the mid 70s I think his life is extraordinary because he unusually for a 20th century scientist was a polymath he had deep interest in biology he his mathematical understanding was extremely good he had an enduring interest in quantum mechanics which I think he would have addressed a great deal he's very interested in Paul Dirac who a very famous mathematician physicist and he probably did more than any single person to shorten the second world war and the huge irony of that is the state that he served then persecuted him for being gay offered him the choice of either pleading guilty and going to prison or accepting chemical castration he chose the latter largely out of curiosity and strangely but it led finally to depression suicide and as I said earlier he died in 1954 eating Apple injected with cyanide it has the ring of a comet's of a Greek tragedy that a man the state all of us owed so much to should then have been persecuted by the state under its rather you know to us now crude primitive laws of the time so I wanted to revive him I wanted to give him the life he might have had and make him a sort of as I say at some point even more famous than Stephen Hawking or almost his famous is Stephen Hawking public intellectual a fighter for gay rights joined in the battle in the early days of aids financed hospice and crucially abolished the magazines of science like nature and science by putting all his work into open source on the internet and became a hero of that as well and the voice really of the digital age and to come back to John's question about what did I know the ending I knew that at some point touring would meet my narrator and deliver a terrible curse on him for something that he has done and the question really was if you buy an artificial human being with a consciousness can you be said to own a consciousness if we take having a consciousness as an irreducible good in itself what would it mean to own someone else's so if you buy a robot are you allowed to kill it and Turing had very in my novel my Turing has very very firm ideas that you absolutely cannot and thinking into the future I mean the distant future we might get to the point where we have to grant rights and responsibilities to conscious beings if they can live alongside us yes sir addition there's a thank you has long been evident and you know I've been reading your work for a long time and the work that you've done in recent years is very different from the fiction that you wrote in the early days in the 1970s when you were known as Ian McCobb and you know I've sometimes wondered whether the title of your most famous novel atonement suggests that that novel was perhaps an effort to atone for work early work that literary critics might not haven't been inclined to take very seriously and so what I'm just what I'm wondering is and have you consciously repudiated the work that you did you know back in the 70s in your short story collections in a favor of these very timely novels that have these big global themes well I don't feel I have anything to a totem pole that that was the work of young me and actually I did come to a point where I didn't feel apologetic about that work but I just felt I'd written myself into too narrow a corner and writing leaving fictional putting it aside for a while and writing I wrote a couple of movies one the imitation game that I've just been describing another one was called the ploughman's lunch which was about the Falklands War and the Suez Crisis was a way of stepping aside from the these rather overheated narrow interestingly perverse I still think my point of view short stories and short novels but no atonement did not refer to my own processes I can absolutely assure you that I stand by that work it's still on sale I still take the royalties and it would be a terrible thing to repudiate it and still take them take the money questions yes sir yeah you're you stand up please and so I was wondering would you define this novel posthuman itself what does that tell us do there's a moment in the novel when Adam tells Charlie the narrator not to get too depressed about artificial humans being clever than humans he says because you too will sooner or later improve your own brains and already in hospitals around the world there are people who can move a cursor across a screen because I have a little diode in their motor strip they just have to sync and the cursor moves one way or the other which is a fantastic liberation for those who are locked in in consciousness and that almost certainly will extend also in interventions in IVF and sifting through eggs and sperm to improve ourselves again something that we sensibly are very very careful and regulate a great deal but other countries are not and the race will be on already there are two scientists scientists in China don't if you followed that who actually completely transformed the genome of two twins whether this represents posthumanism life I don't know I think that this urge to become God and make man make a woman is a very ancient impulse very ancient fantasy you think of Prometheus who made humans a very powerful myth think of the argonautica Jason and the organ are Argonauts where there is a robot stands 20 feet tall hurls boulders at Jason's ship think too of one of the most powerful stories of our age powerful myths and that is of genesis of a benevolent god shaping to two beings and then of course the great modern text is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein I think these all stand right in the heart of humanism the Shelley's story warns us that dr. Frankenstein's monster becomes a murderer that has become our text for the dangers of Technology so I think post humanism I think our own values are going to change slowly with the process that we will accept artificial consciousnesses into our lives and we will be changed as much as them and they will force on us a reflection of what it is to be human so I'm reluctant about these terms because they all devolve around human ingenuity and actually will emphasize the problems of both humanism we have time for one more yes ma'am this is the asking Isis wondering child:yeah [Music] I join you No okay can you paraphrase a question yeah so I cannot the question which is actually very lyrically stated is this that I have often written about children and they seemed to have tell me if this is the wrong word but they seem to have a redemptive quality that they have something that you know that something that we have either lost or forgotten in ourselves and there's something of the the Savior as it were in the notion of a child whose innocence is slowly eroded by social reality well I think really why there is a child in this in this novel because the child is called Mark Adam the robot is frosty towards this child suspicious can't quite make out when the little boy who likes to dress up in what likes to think of himself as a princess and loves to rap and down the room flitting about because he calls it and dancing Adam cannot understand this how we would write the algorithm for a robot who appreciates the nature of a child is a very perplexing question I mean maybe we will just rely on deep learning and and and hope it will just come about of its own I rather doubt it actually I really doubt it that's why I wanted this little chip of ice in Adams heart when he contemplates I mean there are good evolutionary reasons why children and other mammals play [Music] but those evolutionary descriptions and explanations do not actually catch the full delight of play and so I think that it's a kind of hint at the limitation of the consciousness that we might make or what an artificial consciousness might be we're out Sam Thank You Ian thank you folks for coming tonight the book is machines like me and if you haven't read it buy a copy tonight ok and read it it's a great book so very much John [Applause]

Channel: Strand Book Store

Views: 3,738

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Id: 4Wi3PR0UJqY

Length: 57min 34sec (3454 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019