True of the smallest and largest concerns. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise. The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. I guess it gave McEwan space to philosophise:

I suppose it was interesting (and morally satisfying) to have Turing alive and present in this novel, and McEwan must have had some fun imagining a world in which Heller wrote Catch-18 and Tolstoy penned All's Well That Ends Well, but honestly, this alternate past wasn't integral to the plot. Set in the 1980s, this is a world in which JFK was never assassinated, Carter beat Reagan in his second presidential election, Argentina won the war for the Falkland Islands, and perhaps most importantly, Alan Turing chose a jail term over chemical castration to deal with his “crime” of homosexuality, and his time locked up gave him the mental space to solve the math problems that would lead to the development of AI that would pass his own Turing Test. Bottom line: Like a pleasant walk in the park in which nothing of much interest happens it's still always nice to have a walk in the park. Set in an alternate recent past, McEwan investigates the dawn of sentient AI, and as current and as interesting as that concept may be to us today, he doesn't really add anything new to the imagined whatifs of this scenario. Machines Like Me is eminently readable – I was never bored or annoyed or impatient (which happens too often with too many books) – but even though Ian McEwan can undeniably string together words in satisfying arrangements, this book felt ultimately pointless. Believe me, these lines express no triumph.Only regret.

With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you. It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come.

Machines like me analysis