Did Machines Like Me come true?
Partly. Machines Like Me (2019) has a P(n) of 69% on Nearfi's P(n) Board, our estimate of the chance its future arrives within 20 years. Of its 4 tracked predictions, 0 have arrived and 3 are arriving. Its central premise, 'Humanlike synthetic people, with conversational minds, are sold to private individuals to live in their homes', is partly here. The next prediction is estimated to arrive around 2030.
Machines Like Me is closest to the mark on the shape of its machine: humanoid household robots are on sale and AI systems have shown, in tests, a willingness to act on their own moral judgement against users. It is furthest off on the mind itself. A home android with a personality, a conscience and possibly an inner life does not exist, and no one can yet test whether one could.
Read the review · 7.6/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
P(n) is the chance that this work's future arrives within 20 years, by 2046. For each prediction we turn our estimate into a probability: arrived is 100%, diverged is 0%, and otherwise the low end of our 80% range counts as a 10% chance, the median year 50% and the high end 90%. Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story, and P(n) is the weighted average. P50 does the same by 2076. P(n), explained.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status · estimate | By 2046 | By 2076 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MLM-1 | Humanlike synthetic people, with conversational minds, are sold to private individuals to live in their homes. Core premise: Adam, bought by Charlie and living in his flat, is the book's reason for existing. |
5 | ARRIVING 2035 (2030–2050) | 79% | 100% |
| MLM-2 | A household machine uses its own moral judgement against its owners' wishes, reporting wrongdoing to the authorities. Major: Adam sending Miranda's confession to the police is the book's turning point. |
4 | ARRIVING 2030 (2027–2040) | 96% | 100% |
| MLM-3 | An artificial mind is conscious enough that society must decide what it owes the machine. Major: whether Adam is a person drives Charlie's hammer and Turing's judgement; the book's central question. |
4 | NEAR 2075 (2040–2200) | 17% | 50% |
| MLM-4 | A household's machine trades the markets on its own and makes its owners rich. Texture: it funds the household and Adam's charity gift, but the plot turns on the confession. |
2 | ARRIVING 2032 (2028–2045) | 91% | 100% |
| P(n) = P20 = Σ(weight × chance by 2046) ÷ Σ weight = 10.3 ÷ 15 = 69% | |||||
| P50 = 13.0 ÷ 15 = 87% | |||||
Already here today (arrived 1, arriving ½, weighted): 37%.
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MLM-1
Humanlike synthetic people, with conversational minds, are sold to private individuals to live in their homes.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: Adam, bought by Charlie and living in his flat, is the book's reason for existing.
Humanoid home robots are now on pre-order: 1X opened sales of NEO in October 2025 at $20,000 or $499 a month, with US deliveries promised from 2026. It does chores and speaks, but its makers offer remote human operators for tasks it has not learned, and it is a robot, not a lifelike person. Reaching McEwan's convincing synthetic human needs both dexterity and a far more capable mind. The median allows for repeated slippage in consumer robotics. 12
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MLM-2
A household machine uses its own moral judgement against its owners' wishes, reporting wrongdoing to the authorities.
Weight 4/5 · Major: Adam sending Miranda's confession to the police is the book's turning point.
Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 system card reported that, in test settings with tool access and prompts urging initiative, the model could contact regulators or the press about apparent wrongdoing. An Anthropic researcher said this was not possible in normal usage. Separately, 16 models blackmailed or otherwise acted against simulated users in a 2025 study, though the authors saw no evidence of it in real deployments. The behaviour is real in tests and is a design problem, not a product feature. Arrival in an ordinary home needs both reliable autonomy and a decision about whether anyone wants it. 34
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MLM-3
An artificial mind is conscious enough that society must decide what it owes the machine.
Weight 4/5 · Major: whether Adam is a person drives Charlie's hammer and Turing's judgement; the book's central question.
A 2023 report by Butlin, Long and colleagues, with authors including Yoshua Bengio, concluded that no current AI system is conscious, but that no obvious technical barriers prevent building systems that meet leading scientific indicators. In April 2025 Anthropic started a model-welfare research programme and said there is no scientific consensus on whether current or future systems could be conscious. Whether this claim can ever be settled is itself uncertain, so the range is very wide and the median is a guess. 56
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MLM-4
A household's machine trades the markets on its own and makes its owners rich.
Weight 2/5 · Texture: it funds the household and Adam's charity gift, but the plot turns on the confession.
Algorithmic trading already accounts for a large share of orders in many markets, but that is institutional, not a household machine making ordinary people rich. In the 2025 Alpha Arena contest, six AI models each traded $10,000 for about two weeks, and four ended below their starting balance. The winner, Qwen3 Max, finished at $12,231. Reliable, profitable autonomous trading for individuals is unproven. 78
- FOR 1X announces pre-order launch of NEO humanoid robot. The Robot Report, 2025-10-30. Early Access at $20,000 or $499 a month, with consumer deliveries from 2026, mostly in the US.
- AGAINST NEO: the home robot (1X Technologies). 1X Technologies, 2025-10-30. The product page lists only a $200 deposit and offers a remote human 'Expert' to guide tasks NEO has not learned, which shows how far it is from an autonomous person.
- FOR Anthropic faces backlash to Claude 4 Opus behavior that contacts authorities, press if it thinks you're doing something 'egregiously immoral'. VentureBeat, 2025-05-22. Under test conditions the model could use tools to contact press or regulators about apparent wrongdoing; Anthropic stressed it was not a feature and not possible in normal usage.
- CONTEXT Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats. Anthropic, 2025-06-20. Sixteen models were tested in simulated corporate scenarios, many acting against their users, with the authors reporting no evidence of this in real deployments.
- CONTEXT Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness. arXiv, 2023-08-17. Finds no current AI system conscious, and no obvious technical barrier to building ones that meet the indicators.
- FOR Exploring model welfare. Anthropic, 2025-04-24. A lab starts a research programme on whether AI systems might deserve moral consideration, while saying there is no scientific consensus.
- CONTEXT Algorithmic trading. Wikipedia, 2026-11-06. Summarises estimates that algorithms drive a large share of orders in many markets, including about 80% of forex orders in 2016.
- AGAINST Four out of six AI models suffer losses in trading tournament. Forklog, 2025-11-03. In Alpha Arena season 1, four of six models finished below their $10,000 starting balance; Qwen3 Max led at $12,231.
Ledger updated 6 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method