Goines On: Library due notice

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The local library’s due notice was addressed to Goines as “Dr. Goines,” at sight of which he grinned, pleased that he seemed to be highly regarded locally, at least in book circles. “Please note,” the notice said, “the due date on the following items…Machines like me: and people like you / Ian McEwan.”
    Goines wasn’t even reading the local library’s copy; he was listening to an audiobook from the National Library Service. But he did want to copy out a passage or two from the printed pages, so he’d better get with it.
    One was the first two lines of a haiku that the robot Adam, the “you” of the book’s subtitle (“people like you”), has written and shows to Charlie (who purchased Adam) a few days after Adam has “made love to” Charlie’s girlfriend, Miranda:

You and the moment
Came when I touched your—

    “I don’t want to hear that.” [said Charlie, the 1st-person narrator]
    “I shouldn’t show it to her?”
    I sighed and he moved away. As he reached the door I added, “Clear up the kitchen and bathroom, would you please? Difficult to do with one hand.” [Adam had grabbed Charlie’s arm harder than intended when Charlie had reached to press Adam’s on/off switch and broken a bone in Charlie’s wrist.]

    Another passage that Goines wanted to copy out narrated Charlie’s interview with Alan Turing, who, in McEwan’s novel didn’t die in 1954, but is still alive in 1982 and active in artificial intelligence. Turing is talking:

“The point is, chess is not a representation of life. It’s a closed system…But life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends. So is language – not a problem to be solved or a device for solving problems. It’s more like a mirror, no, a billion mirrors in a cluster like a fly’s eye, reflecting, distorting, and constructing our world at different focal lengths….”

    Goines saw instantly that his own, simple circular or spherical representation of interacting (or not-interacting) human consciousness would not do, that the reality of the thing was far too complex for his brain. At least, although the real Turing was dead, McEwan was still alive and writing. His book seemed to Goines a pretty good representation of our perceived reality.

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