This most recent of Ishiguro’s novels contains a futuristic take on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our domestic/personal lives. Klara is an AF – Artificial Friend – a sort of human-like robot who is intelligent and even unique, but nevertheless a device, designed to help children who have illnesses by living with them, being their companion, looking after them, alerting family to deterioration in health, etc.
What strikes one about Ishiguro’s angle is how extremely sympathetically he has rendered these robotic AFs. He gives them personalities, he insists they are intelligent in the sense of being able to learn independently and problem-solve creatively, they also have feelings and attachments and preferences. In some ways, he shows they are still relatively basic, such as their limited movement range or visual processing abilities; they can negotiate certain terrain only, and even moving of familiar objects in a space can disorientate them until they realign them in their ‘boxes’, or vision. For example, Klara finds it hard to navigate the outdoors and uneven terrain, and in constantly rendering the narrative from Klara’s perspective Ishiguro gives us a sense of how it feels to be an AF:
The field became partitioned into boxes, some larger than others, and I pressed on, conscious of the contrasting atmospheres between one box and another. […] While crossing one particularly unkind box […] I was convinced that if I could only pull myself through into a kinder box, I’d become safe. I’d also been aware of a voice calling to me, and I now spotted an object – shaped like one of the overhaul men’s traffic cones […] I realized it was in fact two cones, one inserted into the other, allowing the higher one to perform a rocking motion, perhaps to draw the attention of the passers-by. […] I came closer, then realized these weren’t cones at all, but Rick, holding back the grass with one hand […]
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Making sense of the human world is clearly a huge challenge for a robot. For example, when Josie gives a party and the house is full of guests, Klara finds it challenging to process what she ‘sees’:
Its network of sofas, soft rectangles, low tables, plant pots, photography books, had taken me a long time to master, yet now it had been so transformed it might have been a new room. There were young people everywhere and their bags, jackets, oblongs were all over the floor and surfaces. What was more, the room’s space had become divided into twenty-four boxes – arranged in two tiers – all the way to the rear wall. […] Josie was near the middle of the room talking with three guest girls. Their heads were almost touching, and because of how they were standing, the upper parts of their faces, including all their eyes, had been placed in a box on the higher tier, while all their mouths and chins had been squeezed into a lower box.
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If the talk of boxes is disorientating, this is probably how Klara feels being asked to interpret a human world through AI abilities.
In a sense, there is something slightly horrifying about treating even a device as a mere object when it clearly displays feelings, is sentient, has morals, has intentions, has plans it makes up itself, even has secrets – Ishiguro’s novel makes us wonder where the dividing line lies between human and non-human. When Josie insists Klara is the AF she wants, in the store, they discuss Klara right in front of Klara as one would discuss a computer or a phone that one is buying, without needing to take its feelings into consideration:
There was silence, then the Mother said quietly, ‘This one isn’t a B3, I take it.’“
’Klara is a B2,’ Manager said. ‘From the fourth series, which some say has never been surpassed.’
‘But not a B3.’
‘The B3 innovations are truly marvelous. But some customers feel, for a certain sort of child, a top-range B2 can still be the most happy match.’
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And yet there is no doubt Klara and AFs have feelings, even if they may be differently experienced from human emotions. They understand kindness, they can hope, they can feel sadness.
By and large, Klara is treated kindly by her family, and valued by them for her many uses and accomplishments/abilities. But she is still objectified, and without protest or any indication she feels things should be otherwise. She is relegated to empty spaces when she is no longer needed by Josie, as one would put an old phone away or a soft toy one has outgrown. True, Josie does try to arrange a view in Klara’s space for her, because Josie is a kind girl and has loved Klara and understands her preferences; but still, Klara is put away, without anyone seeming to find this treatment outrageous, least of all Klara herself. Klara has seemingly no ego, no sense of self, which is surprising given she has such a deep understanding of very human notions like privacy, hurt pride, hidden motivations, sacrifice.
The novel also has hints that this future world is quite different from our own, where parents have the choice to genetically modify their child – ‘lifted’, the novel calls this process – not without risk or cost to the child’s health and even survival – and yet, not selecting this option for a child means they will be considered second class citizens all their lives, and rejected from the best schools, institutions, etc. The novel never fully explains everything, hints and nuances are scattered throughout, but clearly AF technology is still new in this stage, because many adults seem uncomfortable with Klara, not quite knowing whether it would be rude to ignore her, as one ignores an object, or whether to greet her and include her as if she were a person. The social etiquette appears as yet still unclear. Klara herself seems to appreciate kindness while taking no offense at unkindness or rudeness towards her. (The implication is that she is programmed that way.)
It is a very typically Ishiguro novel, beautifully rendered with his lightness of touch and slight air of mystery, where the workings of the world are not fully explained to the reader, leaving the reader to figure it out from what we can glean off the narrative. This one challenges the reader to determine where and how humanity is defined, and what makes a human being unique if anything, or whether cloning (or some form of duplication of a human being) is actually possible. In all, a very thought-provoking read, deceptively simple on the surface, and quite charming for most part, but running very deep/profound in its potential implications and ramifications.
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