Writer Ian McEwan: ‘AI already penetrating our lives in all kinds of ways’

The novelist Ian McEwan has tackled big subjects from climate change to the Iraq war in his work, and he’s a passionate Remain campaigner. But his new novel ‘Machines Like Me’ is more concerned with artificial intelligence than Brexit.

He sets the book in an alternative 1980s, where Britain loses the Falklands War, Tony Benn became Prime Minister, and autonomous robots become available to buy. We spoke to him and asked why he’d chosen to set a story on the anxieties and pleasures of technology in the past, rather than a future dystopia.