Machines Like Me

It was my mind’s eyes, or my heart’s, that watched as Adam and Miranda lay down on the unyielding embrace of the futon and found the comfortable posture for a clasp of limbs. I watched as she whispered in his ear, but I didn’t hear the words. She had never whispered in my ear at such times. I saw him kiss her – longer and deeper than I had ever kissed her. The arms that heaved up the window frame were tightly around her. Minutes later I almost looked away as he knelt with reverence to pleasure her with his tongue. This was the celebrated tongue, wet and breathily warm, adept at uvulars and labials, that gave his speech its authenticity. I watched, surprised by nothing. He didn’t fully satisfy my beloved then, as I would have, but left her arching her slender back, eager for him as he arranged himself above her with smooth, slow-loris formality, at which point my humiliation was complete. I saw it all in the dark – men would be obsolete. I wanted to persuade myself that Adam felt nothing and could only imitate the motions of abandonment. That he could never know what we knew. But Alan Turing himself had often said and written in his youth that the moment we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine. So when the night air was suddenly penetrated by Miranda’s extended ecstatic scream that tapered to a moan and then a stifled sob – all this I actually heard twenty minutes after the shattering of the window – I duly laid on Adam the privilege and obligations of a conspecific. I hated him.

*

Early the following morning, for the first time in years, I tipped into my coffee a heaped spoon of sugar. I watched the confined, nut-brown disc of fluid turn then slow in its clockwise motion, then lose all purpose in a chaotic swirl. Tempting, but I resisted a metaphor for my own existence. I was trying to think and it was barely seven thirty. Soon, Adam or Miranda or both would appear at my door. I wanted my thoughts and attitude in coherent form. After a night of broken sleep, I was depressed as well as angry with myself, and determined not to appear so. Miranda had kept her distance from me and so, by contemporary standards, a night with someone else, even something else, was not quite a betrayal. As for the ethical dimensions of Adam’s behaviour, here was a history with a curious beginning. It was during the miners’ strike of twelve years before that self-driving cars first appeared on experimental sites, mostly disused airfields, where movie set designers had constructed imitation streets, motorway junctions, and various hazards.

‘Autonomous’ was never the right word, for the new cars were as dependent as newborn babies on mighty networks of computers linked to satellites and on-board radar. If artificial intelligence was to guide these vehicles safely home, what set of values or priorities should be assumed in the software? Fortunately, in moral philosophy there already existed a well-explored set of dilemmas known in the business as ‘the trolley problem’. Adapted easily to cars, the sort of problem manufacturers and their software engineers now posed was this: you, or rather, your car is driving at the maximum legal speed along a narrow suburban road. The traffic is flowing nicely. On the pavement on your side of the road is a group of children. Suddenly, one of them, a child of eight, runs out across the road, right into your path. There’s a fraction of a second to make a decision – either mow the child down, swerve onto the crowded pavement, or into the oncoming traffic and collide head on with a truck at a closing speed of eighty miles an hour. You’re alone, so that’s fine, sacrifice or save yourself. What if your spouse and your two children are in the car? Too easy? What if it’s your only daughter, or your grandparents, or your pregnant daughter and your son-in-law, both in their mid-twenties? Now, take into account the occupants of the truck. A fraction of a second is more than enough time for a computer to give thorough consideration to all the issues. The decision will depend on the priorities ordered by the software.