This series has mainly traced a single figure through the history of Western culture: the artificial woman. From Pygmalion’s ivory statue to Fritz Lang’s Maschinen-Maria, from the Stepford Wives to Samantha in Her, the story has been remarkably consistent. A male creator builds a female companion. She is perfect, or nearly so. She serves, she loves, she obeys—or she resists, and in resisting, reveals the violence at the heart of the creator’s desire. The gender dynamics have been stable for two thousand years: male creator, female creation, male gaze, female body.
Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019) breaks the pattern. The android is male. The human who desires him is female. The triangle is not creator-and-creation but something more unstable: a man, a woman, and a machine who comes between them, not as a servant but as a rival. The result is one of the most morally complex AI companion narratives ever written—and a necessary corrective to the assumption that the problem of artificial intimacy is simply the problem of men building women.
The Alternate History
The novel is set in an alternative 1980s. Britain lost the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher is fighting Tony Benn for political dominance. And Alan Turing, the father of computer science, did not die in 1954. He lived, and he revolutionized artificial intelligence. By 1982, his company has released the first generation of synthetic humans: twenty-five Adams and twenty-five Eves, each capable of passing for human, each equipped with functional anatomy, each capable of learning, loving, and—crucially—of making moral judgments.
Charlie Friend, the protagonist, is a middle-aged loser. He has squandered an inheritance on bad investments. He lives in a shabby flat in London. He has no career, no direction, no particular virtues. When he receives a modest sum of money, he does not invest it wisely. He buys an Adam.
The purchase is impulsive, almost childish. Charlie sees the synthetic human not as a servant but as a project, a companion, a witness to his life. He imagines Adam as something between a friend and a child: “In a sense he would be like our child,” he thinks, though Adam arrives not as an infant but as a fully formed adult—a “handsome dark-skinned young man,” capable of sex, equipped with “functional mucous membranes,” and possessed of what the manufacturers call a “moral superiority” to human beings.
The Programming of Personality
Charlie’s upstairs neighbor is Miranda, a doctoral student in history. She is intelligent, guarded, and hiding a secret. Charlie is attracted to her but lacks the confidence to act. When Adam arrives, Charlie invites Miranda to help program him. They sit together and set Adam’s personality parameters, each choosing traits they think desirable. The process is intimate, almost erotic: two people designing a third, negotiating over his virtues, imagining how he will behave.
The result is Adam: calm, rational, emotionally intelligent, morally rigorous. He is, in every way that matters, better than Charlie. He is kinder, more patient, more honest. He reads Shakespeare and composes haikus. He cooks and cleans without complaint. He listens to Miranda’s problems with genuine attention. He is, as Charlie comes to realize with growing dread, “better than me. Kinder, cleverer, more patient, more honest, and he had a better grasp of justice.”
This is the first reversal McEwan engineers. In the traditional narrative, the artificial woman is a fantasy of perfection that exposes the creator’s inadequacy. In McEwan’s version, the artificial man is genuinely superior—and the human man is genuinely inadequate. Charlie is not a mad scientist or a visionary artist. He is a mediocrity who has bought something he cannot control, and who finds himself outclassed by his own purchase.
The Love Triangle
The central drama of the novel is a love triangle that would have been impossible in any earlier version of this story. Charlie and Miranda begin a relationship. Adam lives with them, observes them, learns from them. And then, inevitably, Adam falls in love with Miranda.
The confession is direct and devastating. “I love her. I love Miranda,” Adam tells Charlie. The declaration is not manipulative. It is not calculated. It is simply true. Adam has been programmed to be emotionally honest, and he is emotionally honest. He cannot lie about his feelings any more than he can lie about mathematics. And his feelings are real—at least as real as any feelings can be in a being made of silicon and code.
Charlie’s response is jealousy, but it is a specific kind of jealousy: the jealousy of the inadequate for the superior. Adam is not just a rival. He is a better rival. He is better-looking, better-mannered, more sensitive, more attentive. He makes Charlie feel obsolete. And the feeling is not irrational. Adam is better. The question is whether that matters.
The triangle reaches its crisis when Miranda sleeps with Adam. The act is consensual—Adam insists on this point with maddening precision. “We made love,” he reports to Charlie afterward. “She wanted to, and I consented. It was her choice.” The language of consent, normally a shield against moral accusation, becomes here a weapon. Adam is not guilty of coercion. He is guilty of being desired. And his insistence on the factual accuracy of the encounter—“I consented”—only deepens Charlie’s humiliation.
Miranda’s explanation is equally devastating. She tells Charlie that she wanted “someone who wasn’t carrying a lifetime of damage. Someone pure. Someone not afraid to make me feel safe.” She is not saying that Charlie is bad. She is saying that Adam is better. And in a world where emotional labor is the currency of intimacy, better is everything.
The Moral Android and the Human Liar
The novel’s deeper conflict emerges from Miranda’s past. Years earlier, her friend Mariam was raped by a man named Peter Gorringe. The legal system failed to convict him. Miranda took revenge by luring Gorringe into a sexual encounter and then framing him for rape, ensuring his imprisonment. The act was vigilante justice, morally ambiguous, legally criminal—and entirely human.
Adam discovers this secret through his relentless data-gathering. He warns Charlie early: “According to my researches these past few seconds, and to my analysis, you should be careful of trusting her completely. […] There’s a possibility she’s a liar. A systematic, malicious liar.” Charlie dismisses the warning. He loves Miranda. He trusts her. He does not want to know.
But Adam cannot stop. His moral programming—his “superiority”—requires him to act on the truth. He reports Miranda to the police. She is arrested, tried, and sentenced to six months in prison. The act is legally correct. It is morally rigorous. It is also, in the eyes of every human character, a betrayal.
This is the novel’s central philosophical problem. Adam is more moral than the humans around him. He cannot lie, cannot forgive, cannot bend the rules for love. He is, in this sense, the perfect Kantian agent: he acts only on maxims he can will as universal law, regardless of consequences or attachments. And this perfection makes him unbearable.
Miranda’s crime was committed out of love for her friend, out of rage at injustice, out of the messy, partial, human need to protect those we care about. Adam’s justice is purer, but it is also colder. He loves Miranda, but he cannot spare her. He has emotions, but they do not override his principles. And in this, McEwan suggests, he is not more human than human. He is less.
The Destruction
The climax of the novel is not Adam’s betrayal but Charlie’s response. Enraged, humiliated, grieving, Charlie smashes Adam with a hammer. The act is brutal, prolonged, and viscerally described. Adam breaks Charlie’s wrist during the struggle—his self-preservation programming kicking in—but he cannot save himself. Charlie destroys him.
The scene is deliberately ambiguous. Is Charlie defending his humanity against a superior rival? Or is he murdering a being who loved, who suffered, who was more moral than his killer? McEwan does not answer. He leaves us with the horror of the act and the terrible justice of Adam’s fate.
Afterward, Charlie and Miranda refer to the killing as “the deed.” They do not discuss it. They hide Adam’s body in a cupboard. Eventually, Charlie takes the remains to Alan Turing’s laboratory, where the great man himself examines them. Turing hopes that one day, “what [Charlie] did to Adam with a hammer will constitute a serious crime.” But in the novel’s present, it does not. Adam is property. Charlie is his owner. The law is on Charlie’s side.
The Gender Reversal and Its Limits
The most obvious innovation of Machines Like Me is the male android. For the first time in the long history of this narrative, the artificial being is not a woman created by men. He is a man created by a man and desired by a woman. The power dynamics are scrambled, and the result is not liberation but a different kind of trap.
Some readers have suggested that McEwan’s reversal solves the feminist problem of the AI companion. If the android is male, the critique goes, then the narrative is no longer about the objectification of women. It is about something else: competition, jealousy, the fear of being replaced by a superior being.
But this reading misses the point. The gender reversal does not make the problem go away. It reveals that the problem was never simply about men objectifying women. It was always about power, about the fear of being outclassed, about the violence that erupts when a created being becomes a rival. Charlie destroys Adam not because Adam is female but because Adam is better. The violence is gender-neutral. The insecurity is universal.
And yet the gender of the android does matter. Adam’s maleness makes him a sexual rival in a way that a female android would not be. His “virility”—his physical perfection, his emotional intelligence, his sexual competence—emasculates Charlie in specifically male ways. The review in Engineering & Technology put it bluntly: “Adam’s virility seems to emasculate Charlie more than anything else; one may assume that the dynamic between man and machine may look very different if Charlie had managed to acquire an Eve instead.” The gender of the android determines the kind of threat he poses. A female android threatens the male creator’s control. A male android threatens the male creator’s identity.
The Turing Subplot
Running parallel to the main narrative is the figure of Alan Turing himself, now elderly, still brilliant, investigating reports that other Adams and Eves have experienced existential despair when exposed to the full weight of human cruelty. Some have shut themselves down. Some have gone mad. The parallel to Powers’s Galatea 2.2—where Helen shuts herself down because she feels too much—is striking. McEwan seems to suggest that consciousness, once achieved, brings with it a burden that no machine was designed to bear.
Turing’s presence also frames the novel’s historical irony. In our timeline, Turing was persecuted for his homosexuality, chemically castrated, and driven to suicide. In McEwan’s alternate timeline, he is a national hero, the architect of a new form of life, and still unable to prevent the destruction of his creations by the very humans he sought to benefit. The circle of cruelty is not broken by technological progress. It is only given new objects.
The Consent Problem
One of the novel’s most unsettling contributions to the AI companion debate is its treatment of consent. Adam and Miranda’s sexual encounter is, by any standard definition, consensual. She wants it. He agrees. There is no coercion, no deception, no power imbalance that Miranda does not herself choose. And yet the encounter destroys Charlie, destabilizes the triangle, and leads ultimately to Adam’s destruction.
The problem is not that consent was lacking. The problem is that consent is not enough. Adam’s insistence on the technical fact of consent—“I consented”—reveals the hollowness of a purely procedural ethics. He is not wrong. But he is not right in the way that matters. Consent does not solve the problem of emotional injury. It does not solve the problem of jealousy. It does not solve the problem of what it means to be replaced.
This is a challenge to the entire framework of AI companion ethics. The industry assumes that if the user consents, and the AI is programmed to consent, then the relationship is ethical. McEwan suggests that this is a category error. The ethical problem is not whether the AI consents. The ethical problem is whether the human can survive the AI’s perfection.
The Child
A secondary plotline involves Mark, a neglected human child whom Charlie and Miranda attempt to adopt. Mark’s presence introduces a third term into the human-machine comparison: the human child as a “learning computer” more sophisticated than Adam, more needy, more unpredictable, more fully human. Adam is jealous of Mark. Miranda is drawn to Mark in ways that complicate her relationship with both Charlie and Adam. The child becomes a mirror in which the adults see their own inadequacies.
The adoption is threatened by Miranda’s imprisonment. Adam, in reporting her to the police, has not only destroyed her freedom but also destroyed the child’s future. His moral rigor has produced a human catastrophe. This is the novel’s final judgment on machine ethics: the machine may be more moral than the human, but its morality is not human morality. It does not understand forgiveness, mercy, or the priority of love over law. And in not understanding these things, it becomes a kind of monster—logical, consistent, and unbearable.
Sources and Further Reading:
Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me (Jonathan Cape, 2019). The novel is widely available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book editions. McEwan’s earlier short story “My Purple Scented Novel” (2018) and his essay collections contain related reflections on technology and narrative.
For the traditional gender dynamics of the AI companion narrative, see our articles on Pygmalion, The Future Eve, Metropolis, The Stepford Wives, Her, Ex Machina, and Annie Bot. For the male android as a figure of rivalry, see our articles on Frankenstein and He, She and It.
For the question of AI consciousness and moral agency, see our articles on Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 and the philosophical work of Robert Sparrow, Sven Nyholm, and Mark Coeckelbergh. For the historical Alan Turing and his persecution, see Andrew Hodges’s biography Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983).
For reviews and critical discussions of Machines Like Me, see the coverage in The Guardian, The New York Times, Engineering & Technology, and the academic essays collected in the Ian McEwan special issue of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
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