Machines Like Me

During this conversation, Adam finished with the dishes and stood with his back to the kitchen sink to watch us, arms folded, his head turning from side to side, speaker to speaker, like a spectator at a tennis match. Our exchange was not exactly weary, but repetition had given it an air of ritual. Like facing armies, we’d taken up our positions and intended to hold them. Miranda was telling me that the Task Force set off without proper ship-to-air missiles. The chiefs of staff let the armed forces down. I used to hear terms like these – ship-to-air, homing devices, titanium-tipped – at the Warwickshire student union bar, but only from men, men of the political left, whose opinions were complicated by tacit admiration for the weapon systems they condemned. In her soft and fluent delivery, she mingled these with other concepts from the lexicon of established power – the open society, rule of law, restoration of democracy. Perhaps it was her father I was hearing.

While she was speaking, I turned to catch Adam’s expression. What I saw was his devoted attention. More than that. A look of delight. He adored what she was saying. I turned back to Miranda as she reminded me that the Falklanders were my fellow citizens, now living under fascism. Was I happy with that? I disliked this rhetorical turn. It was a masked insult. The conversation was turning sour, just as I’d feared, but I couldn’t help myself. In the tiny kitchen space, I was hot and irritable as I reached for the wine and filled my glass. There could have been a negotiated settlement, I started to say. A slow and painless thirty-year transition, a UN mandate, guaranteed rights. She interrupted to inform me that we could never trust any undertaking by the murdering generals. As she said it, I saw them in caricature, in braided hats, campaign ribbons, cavalry boots, and Galtieri on his white horse in a confetti blizzard on the Avenida 25 de Mayo.

I said that I accepted every last one of her arguments. The forces set off on their 8,000-mile mission, her risky strategy was tested and it failed. Thousands she never knew or cared about were drowned or burned to death, or live on, maimed, disfigured, traumatised. We’ve arrived at the worst outcome: the junta possessed the island and its inhabitants. Whereas a policy of slow, negotiated agreement wasn’t tested, but if it had failed we would have reached the same outcome, without the agony and death. We couldn’t know. What might have happened was lost to us. So what was there to argue about?

I saw that the glass I’d filled, and had no memory of touching, was empty. And I was wrong. There was plenty to argue about, for even as I said it, I knew I was crossing a line. I had accused her of not caring about the dead, and she was angry.

Her eyes were narrowed, without merriment, but she didn’t address my transgression. Instead she turned to Adam and asked quietly, ‘What’s your view?’

His gaze travelled from her to me and back. I still didn’t know whether he actually saw anything. An image on some internal screen that no one was watching, or some diffused circuitry to orient his body in three-dimensional space? Seeming to see could be a blind trick of imitation, a social manoeuvre to fool us into projecting onto him a human quality. But I couldn’t help it: when our eyes briefly met and I looked into the blue irises flecked with spears of black, the moment appeared rich with meaning, with anticipation. I wanted to know whether he understood, as I did, and as Miranda surely did, that the issue here was loyalty.

His tone was prompt and calm. ‘Invasion, success or failure. Negotiated settlement, success or failure. Four outcomes or effects. Without benefit of hindsight, we’d have to choose which causes to pursue, which to avoid. We’d be in the realm of Bayesian inverse probability. We’d be looking for the probable cause of an effect rather than the most likely effect of a cause. Only sensible, to try and find a formal representation of our guesswork. Our reference point, our datum, would be an observer of the Falklands situation before any decisions were taken. Certain a priori probability values are ascribed to the four outcomes. As fresh information comes in, we can measure relative changes in probability. But we can’t possess an absolute value. It may help us to define the weight of new evidence logarithmically, so that, assuming a base ten—’

‘Adam. Enough! Really. What nonsense!’ Now it was Miranda who reached for the Médoc.

I was relieved to be no longer the object of her irritation. I said, ‘But Miranda and I would ascribe completely different a priori values.’

Adam turned his head towards me. As always, too slowly. ‘Of course. As I said, when describing the future there can be no absolute values. Only shifting degrees of likelihood.’

‘But they’re entirely subjective.’

‘Correct. Ultimately Bayes reflects a state of mind. As does all of common sense.’