This article also discusses the possibility of emotional/affective robots in the future, probing into the complicated entanglement of humanity and post-humanity. This article focuses on the representations of human-robot emotions and emotional communications in recent science fictions and science fiction (SF) movies to explore how this relationship is imagined as a means to reflect on the ethical and technological challenges of this controversial issue both in fictional and real lives. Technologies such as voice recognition, facial recognition and deep learning all accelerate the socialization of robots that show personal characters.

We have to rethink humans’ position in the world, to reassess the harmful idea of anthropocentrism and to learn to live with non-human in a symbiotic relationship. In the ever cyborgized era of posthumanism, the dividing line between human and robot is becoming blurred. In real scientific world, scientists and engineers in America, Japan, South Korea, China and elsewhere are making increasingly smarter robots (or cyborgs) capable of understanding and expressing human senses and emotions.

It is foreseeable that humans are likely to become growingly dependent on robots to fulfill psychological and emotional needs. The rapid development of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) has dramatically changed human society, facilitating travels and interactions worldwide and, in the meanwhile, increasingly propelling human beings to withdraw to their own worlds. It will be an effort to understand the complex relation between the writer and conventions which come into play in his novel, and it will proceed to read the text against the authorial comments, finding suppressed hints that invite an interpretation of the text as narrated by its android hero rather than human subject. This essay will demonstrate that the text is carefully layered as if to protect its own novelty hidden beneath rather conventional love triangle plot, ponderous political commentary, and genre-specific topicality. McEwan’s commentary on the novel in various interviews only aggravated the critics who were all too ready to conclude that Machines Like Me offered little originality. Instead, the characters are enmeshed in personal problems and conundrums of science and politics, justice and empathy – and love. It also made use of time-honored devices of alternative history without treating it too seriously. It seemed to have appropriated some of the key issues of the genre discourse – the question of what constitutes humanity, of the possibility of coexistence between humans and AI, of the problems of morality and consent. McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me was met with lukewarm reviews and open hostility of the sci-fi genre adherents.

Machines like me by ian mcewan