While technology such as ChatGPT has taken the world – particularly the late-night essay-writing world – by storm over the last year, Ishiguro’s latest novel reminds us that artificial intelligence can (and should) only do so much.
Klara and the Sun is set in a dystopian world in which children are genetically enhanced, known as ‘lifted’, to be more academic. They are given Artificial Friends as companions in the place of other children who have become competition. The protagonist, 14-year-old Josie, has suffered a serious illness as a result of this procedure, and has chosen a particularly observant Artificial Friend named Klara to be her companion. As Klara desperately tries to save Josie from her illness, the novel asks the question of how far is too far when it comes to AI interference in human life.
Klara and the Sun is far from the fear-mongering science fiction novels which reveal evil conspiracies and unforeseen disasters, however. Ishiguro chooses to tell the story from the perspective of humanoid Klara, who at the start of the novel has only experienced life through observing people through the window of the shop in which she was manufactured. As she leaves the shop with Josie, the reader is forced to navigate the world of complex human emotions through fresh eyes. She makes the profound realisations that humans are motivated by a fear of loneliness, that we sometimes put on a face to show to the outside world, that we can genuinely love someone and hurt them at the same time. One interaction which Klara observes, of two lovers – ‘Coffee cup lady and her Raincoat man’ – meeting after a long time apart and experiencing the conflicting emotions of love and pain, seems to epitomise Ishiguro’s thoughts about what it means to be human, an idea left over from his earlier novel Never Let Me Go. Furthermore, humanoid Klara is depicted as having real emotions herself, and arguably this relationship between logic and sentiment is the most alluring aspect of the novel.
This is not to say that Ishiguro dismisses the potential problems that this technology poses to our futures: AI has taken over Josie’s father’s highly specialised job, it has replaced the need for close friendships and even, to one character’s disgust, uses up ‘the seats at the theatre’. The idea that there’s ‘nothing that our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer’ is an unsettling one, and yet one that we must confront. Technology often gives us a sense of control, and we can feel God-like commanding it, but what happens when it touches things that we hope are untouchable? Ishiguro leaves the question open.
Klara and the Sun is not a simple narrative warning us about the dangers of AI, but a complex study on what it means to be human in a developing technological world. Klara is a surprising, loveable character who offers an interesting contrast to the stereotypical image of the bureaucratic and impenetrable AI we might imagine in our dystopian nightmares. Even as we might initially recoil from her reach, as many of the characters do at first in the novel, we cannot help but warm up to her.
“2021-08-20 // K L A R A A birthday isn’t a birthday without a book … and for my birthday I picked up a copy of “Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro. • I’ve only heard good things about this story & cannot wait to read it. #bookstagram #hardbackbooks” by Headphonaught is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0