Kazuo Ishiguro.
Photo: Neil Hall / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
The unlimited help of our digital assistants – our Siris, our Alexas, the voice of Google Maps – gave us a false sense of security. No matter how much we ignore and abuse them, they never tire of our mistakes; you can disobey the lady on your phone and blame her (out loud) for your mistakes, and she will recalculate your route without complaint. Certainly, nothing truly intelligent would tolerate us for a long time, and the Philip K. Dicks and Peter Thiels of this world have spent decades trying to convince us that AI rebellion is inevitable. But Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, his eighth novel and first book since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, issues a quieter and stranger warning: Machines can Never revolt. Instead, Ishiguro sees a future in which automata simply continue to do what we ask of them, placidly accepting the burden of each small and inconvenient task. The novel takes us into the mind of that ever-renewing patience, where at the beginning it is quite peaceful – until it is chilling.
Ishiguro returns in Klara to disposability and service ideas that he addressed in his other first-person science fiction narrative in 2005 Never let Me Go. In this book, the protagonist, Kathy H., is a clone waiting for her organs to be harvested; at the Klara and the Sun, Klara is an AF (artificial friend), a synthetic girl built to be the companion of a child who, inevitably, will surpass her. Ishiguro’s futurism does not imagine a major rupture or singularity of AI. Instead, Klara’s world follows vectors already in motion. In the near future, automation has replaced many workers, pollution sometimes darkens the sky and the children of wealthy families are educated through the screen as anxiety and loneliness increase and increase.
Klara spends her first weeks or months in a store, attended by the kind manager and waiting to be selected by a customer. She is vigilant. Her speech and behavior are innocent and shy – she is always “wanting to give privacy” to the humans around her. She loves to look out of the laminated glass window in front of the store, to see the little farewells and meetings on the busy street outside. Sometimes, these interactions are human; other times, she sees (and consoles herself with) that AF is taking care of her business out there. But she also realizes how taxis can merge and diverge in her line of sight. The way in which bodies and forms appear, whether human or not, conveys great significance to her. For Klara, looking is a way of thinking.
Klara’s visual processing can sometimes be overwhelmed when confronting something unknown. Instead of a unified image, your eye field is divided into panels, sometimes containing repeated images – a woman’s face seen in various close-up stages – or a cubist fracture of a landscape. It is a type of deeper perception (she sees all the conflicting microexpressions of the woman arranged simultaneously) and a more rudimentary machine vision: human emotion as a CAPTCHA grid. Klara is particularly sensitive to melancholy and notes that even when people embrace with joy, they can shudder. The manager explains: “Sometimes … people feel a pain beside their happiness”. Of all the lessons that Klara learns, this is the one that she seems to write most deeply in her code. Ishiguro is doing something quite complicated here, pointing to our own somewhat dysfunctional sympathetic functions. He makes Klara describe his own emotions to other people: “I believe I have a lot of feelings,” she says. “The more I watch, the more feelings become available to me.” However, in Klara’s mind, there is often only obligation. Throughout much of the book, your strongest emotions are fear and disorientation and a vague concern that things are “good” or “unkind”. Both Ishiguro, the writer, and Klara, the character seem aware that we will not grant her our compassion unless her feelings are recognizable to us.
Klara’s division of human children begins when the manager gives her good advice: she warns the AF not to believe children who make promises, not even those who seem to love her at first. Even so, Klara is a creature of total commitment. She is chosen and taken home by a fragile 14-year-old girl named Josie, to whom Klara is totally dedicated, ready to be Josie’s servant, nurse, helper and playmate. At Josie’s home, Klara finds unknown terrain. She has to learn to navigate a new physical space and the emotionally insidious landscape of a house full of absent people. Why is Josie sick? Where’s her sister? Why did Josie’s father leave? Operating in what she considers to be Josie’s best interest, Klara makes alliances with Josie’s housekeeper, mother and neighbor and childhood boyfriend, Rick. As she tries to graft her simplicity into the confused confusion of her life, terrible things will eventually be asked of her, but she is ready to serve at all costs.
At a time of extreme pressure at the end of the book, his visual processing system begins to falter. “Before me now,” she thinks to herself as she faces the people around her, “there were so many fragments that they looked like a solid wall. I also began to suspect that many of these shapes were not really three-dimensional, but had been drawn on flat surfaces using clever shading techniques to give the illusion of roundness and depth. ”Even after flipping through the book, I kept going back to that sequence over and over. Are we being encouraged to consider Klara unreliable, since she always accepts what her eyes say? Or is Ishiguro describing the feeling from inside to outside the reading itself, in which we perceive “intelligent shading” as reality?
For those old and foolish enough to have seen Steven Spielberg’s AI Artificial Intelligence, you will notice certain … echoes. As experiences, THERE and Klara and the Sun they are totally different: Spielberg’s film is grand and frighteningly sentimental; Ishiguro’s romance is simple and cold, each emotion treated as if he is trying to prevent it from melting on his tongue. But the plots of the silly film and the elegant book reveal that they are thinking the same things. Both imagine artificial children who will obey their programming, who will see a lot and understand little and who will try to be, and fail, as substitutes for a very fragile offspring. They are also meditations on new varieties of loneliness. And in both, the silicon people develop supernatural beliefs that, strangely enough, have weight in the world of flesh and blood. Where THEREDavid believed in the blue fairy, Klara loves the sun. The little solar-powered robot sees the sun doing real work in the world, so it’s only natural that she starts praying for him. Your thinking is already programmed for self-sacrifice; the selflessness of religion is only a step behind.
Ishiguro wrote an exquisite book. At best, it contains a beauty that is first moving and, in a second reading, sharp and penetrating like a needle. It also follows a trend exposed in his previous novels: to sustain the innocence of his narrators, Ishiguro needs to steal them a little. Its protagonists exist, but they do not grow; they are observers, but not transformers, wonderful at describing an event without understanding its contours. The speaker may be a man trapped in a logical dream town that continues to erase his short-term memory (The Unconsoled) or a parent traveling through a fog that is literally the fog of memory (The buried giant) The world is always new to them; they turn every corner with a clear mind.
This works when Ishiguro’s books have a kit-like quality, lofting – when the plots seem to have no engines, but somehow things move quickly. But in Klara and the Sun, you finally begin to notice how carefully the author had to surround certain complexities to keep his kite in the air. The first 30 or more pages of the book, when Klara is in the store, are perfect. After it goes out into the world, we see the author’s reluctance to fully imagine its existence. It is strange, for example, that a book about a buyable girl is so asexual. Klara is naive, but she never captures even a peripheral human eye perversion? I can not believe.
But then, Ishiguro is not a futurist or even a realist. He is a moralist, holding one of Klara’s broken mirrors for use and waste of our current era. Klara’s pure and very formal phrasing makes the book look like a fable. More than all the science fiction on my bookshelf, Ishiguro’s story reminded me of Oscar Wilde “The Nightingale and the Rose”. In Wilde’s tale – written long before we started to worry about the acquisition of AI – a bird impales itself on a thorn to dye a white flower red, hoping to please the man it loves. All our technological inventions are nightingales, programmed to destroy themselves and the natural world to satisfy the passing whim of some human. Klara shows us how happy she lets herself be pierced in her heart. Ishiguro argues that if we allow her to do this, we will be the ones who will feel the sting.