Machines Like Me: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Charlie sits in the waiting room of a local doctor’s office, where he’s gone for help with an ingrown toenail. As he waits, Charlie looks at the posters on the walls. One depicts an old man sneezing in the direction of a young girl, highlighting all the particles released into the air as he does. Charlie reflects on the relatively recent discovery of germs as spreaders of diseases based on the research of Louis Pasteur and others. He considers how totally arbitrary the world as it exists in the present really is: if certain historical events or scientific discoveries had played out slightly different, the world today would be a totally different place.

 After he’s finished at the doctor’s, Charlie returns home to Adam, who now has his full personality. Charlie doesn’t know how Miranda completed her half of the personality questions, but Adam’s face no longer presents the “certain blankness” it did before. As he observes Adam, Charlie tries to identify features of his and Miranda’s respective personalities: Charlie’s “pointless theorising,” perhaps, or Miranda’s “secretive nature and self-possession.”

In preparation for a potential visit to meet Miranda’s father, Maxfield Blacke, Charlie takes Adam to visit the shop of the local newsagent, Simon Syed. Syed grew up outside Calcutta. Syed keeps an anthropology journal in stock for Charlie, and so on this day, Charlie brings Adam with him to collect it. The two enter the shop, and Charlie introduces Adam to Syed as “My friend Adam.”

Things are fine at first, but while Syed and Charlie make small talk about cricket, Adam goes over to the shelf of magazines—and proceeds to stare into space, completely immobile. Charlie guesses that Adam has gone into sleep mode, and Charlie fears that he’s insulted Syed by trying to pass off his obviously non-human companion as a real person. Syed, noticing Adam, “tactfully” notes to Charlie that the latest issue of Anthropos is in. Charlie, taking the hint, goes over to where Adam is standing beside the magazines. When Syed jokingly asks if Charlie, who is shorter than Syed, is able to reach the magazine “[him]self,” Adam immediately springs back to life, going on a winding philosophical tangent about the nature of the self and the trouble involved in knowing oneself. Charlie leaves with Adam not long after.

One night, Charlie and Adam are at Miranda’s flat for dinner when, over wine, their conversation returns to what has become a recurring source of tension between Charlie and Miranda. Miranda has a strong opinions about the former Falkland Islands. She believes that the Argentine takeover was “a clear violation of international law” and the consequence of problematic “patriotic fervour.” She also supports the Task Force and believes that if they had taken back the islands, democracy may have returned to Argentina. Gingerly at first, but then louder and firmer, Charlie responds with his own take. Mrs. Thatcher’s “ambitions,” he argues, have cost the nation countless lives. He thinks it’s a “political scandal” that she has remained in office.

The argument escalates. Adam looks pleased, particularly as he listens to Miranda. Then, Miranda turns to Adam and asks for his thoughts on the matter. He replies with an extremely logical assessment about how “shifting probabilities” are all people have to judge events without the benefit of hindsight. He rambles on, until eventually Miranda has had enough and demands that he stop. Charlie wonders whether Adam has responded in this way to take a neutral stance between Charlie and Miranda’s opposing views, since he’s equally loyal to both of them. Or perhaps Adam actually agrees with Miranda. At any rate, Charlie realizes that by instigating the argument, he’s doomed himself: he and Miranda won’t be having sex tonight.

Abruptly, Miranda tells Adam he’s free to “charge” at her place tonight (Adam requires six hours plugged into an electrical outlet each night). Adam mutters his agreement, and Miranda gives Charlie a dispassionate kiss before sending him on his way.

Back in his own flat, Charlie sits down with a glass of wine and reflects on “the history of human self-regard” and how it is so contrary to biological reality. Throughout history, humans have set themselves apart from the rest of the living world, only for science to hold that in fact, humans aren’t so different from other living beings—with the exception of consciousness, of course, a quality of which most other animals have less.

Charlie gets up to pour himself more wine and hears movement coming from Miranda’s flat above. He hears Miranda speak, Adam respond to her, and then the sound of the two walking toward the bedroom. Quietly, he follows their movements. When there’s a period of silence, Charlie assumes that Adam must be undressing Miranda. Though Charlie could bound upstairs and stop them, he considers that there’s perhaps something “thrilling” about being the first human to be cuckolded by a robot. So, he instead stands in the dark and envisions the ongoing scene upstairs. As he does so, he thinks of what Alan Turing said about how “the moment we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine.” With this logic in mind, when he hears Miranda orgasm, Charlie “hate[s]” Adam as fiercely as he would if Adam were human.

The next morning, Charlie makes himself some coffee and waits for Adam and Miranda’s inevitable visit. As he waits, he reflects on the moral quandaries machines pose, like what a self-driving car should do if faced with the impossible choice of whether to hit a group of children, or swerve to miss them—and drive straight into an oncoming truck, killing everyone inside the car. Does it make a difference whether there are other passengers in the car, or whether those hypothetical passengers are young or old?

Thinking more about morality, Charlie muses that history, religion, and literature have all taught humanity that “we knew how to be good”—it’s just that we don’t always act on that knowledge. Adam, as a carefully constructed robot, should be Charlie’s “moral superior” (or so Adam’s inventors claim). Charlie knows he “would never meet anyone better,” objectively speaking. The issue is that Adam is a possession Charlie bought, and it’s not obvious what Adam owes Charlie. At the same time, nor does Charlie have any say over what Miranda does. Although Charlie knows Miranda will tell him he really has no reason to be upset by her and Adam’s night together, he can’t help but feel furious and betrayed. 

Charlie hears Miranda and Adam walking downstairs, and then he hears Miranda’s key turning in his door. They enter Charlie’s flat; Adam keeps his head bowed, unwilling to look at Charlie, and hides behind Miranda. Miranda looks secretly pleased. She gestures for Adam to sit down. Once he’s seated, she presses the kill switch at the nape of his neck, and he powers down. Now, Charlie and Miranda can speak alone.