Machines Like Me, chapter 1
In the autumn of the twentieth century, it came about at last, the first step towards the fulfilment of an
ancient dream, the beginning of a long lesson that we would teach ourselves that however complicated we
were, however faulty and difficult to describe in even our simplest actions and modes of being, we could
be imitated and bettered. And I was there as a young man, an early and eager adopter in that chilly dawn.
But artificial humans were a cliché long before they arrived, so when they did, they seemed to some a
disappointment. The imagination, fleeter than history, than technological advance, had already rehearsed
this future in books, then films and TV dramas, as if human actors, walking with a certain glazed look,
phony head movements, some stiffness in the lower back, could prepare us for life with our cousins in the
future.
I was among the optimists, blessed by unexpected funds following my mother’s death and the sale of the
family home, which turned out to be on a valuable development site. The first truly viable manufactured
human with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression went on sale the
week before the Falklands Task Force set off on a hopeless mission. Adam cost £ 86,000. I brought him
home in a hired van to my flat in north Clapham. I’d made a reckless decision, but I was encouraged by
reports that Sir Alan Turing, war hero and presiding genius of the digital age, had taken delivery of the
same model.
Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me, Jonathan Cape 2019

4) Situate the action : time, place, characters.
5) Explain, in your own words, why the narrator mentions ‘books’, ‘films and TV dramas’ in paragraph 2.
(30 words)
6) Describe the narrator’s attitude towards ‘him’. (70 words)