Abstract: With the gimmick of artificial intelligence and the tricks of character narration, McEwan’s newly released novel, Machines Like Me, tells a realistic story about conflicts and contradictions in the wake of a machine’s engagement with the life of humans and, timely, raises a number of thought-provoking questions, such as “What is the nature of the machine?” “How is the relationship between the machine and humans?” and “Can artificial intelligence surpass or replace human brain?” This article attempts to explore the above mentioned questions by analyzing, within the conceptual framework of Ethical Literary Criticism, two episodes of the story, namely, the tasting of the “Forbidden Fruit” by Adam, the robot, and Miranda, the heroine, and the destruction of Adam. It contends that human beings are products of natural selection and ethical selection, while machines are products of scientific selection. As a machine, Adam has no biological brain text like humans, but only an electronic text used for storing and processing information and commands. Therefore, he has no ethical consciousness to tell the good from the evil. To a large degree, artificial intelligence is a type of electronic text in nature and cannot replace the brain text armed with ethical consciousness, which accounts for Adam’s failture to deal with ethical issues in the world of humans. In a way, the conflicts between robots like Adam and humans like Charlie and Miranda can be seen as the conflicts between scientific selection and ethical selection, and the death of Adam signals the failure of machines’ engagement with ethical issues of the humans.

Key words: Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me, ethical literary criticism, brain text, electronic text