Abstract: Android is originally created out of human aspiration for a better self and a hopeful salvation of humankind. In the meantime, though, humans are also afraid of androids and worried about being replaced by them, thus finding ourselves in a novel ethical predicament, an aporia of constructing a harmonious community, in which humans and machines could coexist. Machines Like Me seems to have offered some imaginary answers to these issues. Through an analysis based on Agamben's political philosophy of life, Esposito's theory of community, and Asimov's three laws of robotics, we may see problems like comprehension deficits, human-machine conflicts, and ethical dilemmas, in the human-machine community composed of Charlie, the protagonist in the novel, and Adam, an android. With the arrival of the A.I. era, therefore, humans should not behave like a Luddite during the Industrial Revolution, but rather free ourselves from the cage of Anthropocentrism and reconsider our way of treating android and artificial intelligence. This is because in a space where mankind and machine coexist, there should not be a master-servant relationship between humans and machines; instead, they are de facto the Constitutive Other of one another, filling the “void” in the community jointly, and turning their co-residing space into a munus: a human-machine community.

Key words: Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me, human-machine community, ethical predicament