Ian McEwan wrote a fascinating novel about this subject: "Machines like Me" ( amazon). The novel is set in England in the 1980s but some things happened different than we remember - it s an alternate history (this is a spoiler free blog). The story is told in first person - by Charlie who lives mostly from the money he inherited from his mother and spends his time mostly with day trading on his computer. Charlie also has an interest in the girl who lives in the flat above him. A company had brought 2 sets of highly intelligent androids on the market - males ore females called Adams & Eves.

Whilst the premises upon which the story rests are somewhat improbable, the exploration of the tensions that might arise upon introducing artificial general intelligence to a household are gripping. AGI for these purposes takes the form of a human-level-intelligent robot called Adam. In practice, of course, such an AI will always think faster than humans and have access to vastly more data. It is not entirely clear, although Alan Turing, who makes a surprise appearance, thinks he does. The truth is, we cannot be sure that anyone other than ourselves possesses consciousness; we can only surmise.

Charlie Friend, the critics, the album and the Beatles reunion (two years after Lennon was actually assassinated) are all figments of Ian McEwan's fertile imagination in his latest novel, "Machines Like Me." The Beatles' presence is a tiny diversion in a counterfactual novel by the author of books including "The Innocent," "Amsterdam," and "Atonement." Set in a world where the atom bomb was never dropped and John Kennedy survived his Dallas shooting, the crucial alternative reality is that Alan Turing, the genius who broke Nazi Germany's secret codes during World War II, was not hounded into suicide for being homosexual -- instead, he lived to spark huge technological breakthroughs that led to an earlier Digital Age, with progress sped up by Turing's generous open sourcing.

A former electronics whiz kid, he has squandered his youth on dilettantish studies in physics and anthropology, followed by a series of botched get-rich-quick schemes. His parents are dead, his friends (if they exist) go unmentioned, and his employment consists of forex trading on an old laptop in his two-room apartment. He seems to leave home only to buy chocolate at a local newsstand or, once, after noticing a pain in his foot, to have an ingrown toenail removed, an apt literalization of his enervating self-involvement. Perhaps out of some desire for correction, Charlie sells his mother's house to finance the purchase of Adam, one of twenty-five cutting-edge androids built to serve as an "intellectual sparring partner, friend and factotum." The impulsive slacker is all too ready to exchange his birthright for a mess of wattage.