It’s both a deeper kind of perceiving (she sees all the woman’s conflicting microexpressions arrayed simultaneously) and a more rudimentary machine vision: human emotion as CAPTCHA grid. Instead of a unified image, her ocular field breaks into panels, sometimes containing repeated pictures - a woman’s face seen in various stages of close-up - or a cubist fracturing of a landscape. Klara’s visual processing can sometimes be overwhelmed when confronting something unfamiliar. For Klara, looking is a kind of thinking. The way bodies and forms appear, whether human or not, conveys great meaning to her. But she also notices the way taxicabs can fuse and diverge in her line of sight. Sometimes these interactions are human other times, she sees (and takes comfort from) AF’s going about their business outside. She loves to look out the plate-glass window at the front of the shop, to see the small leave-takings and reunions on the bustling street outside.
Her speech and behavior are both innocent and diffident - she is always “wishing to give privacy” to the humans around her. Klara spends her first weeks or months in a store, tended by the gentle Manager and hoping to be selected by a customer. In this near future, automation has replaced many workers, pollution sometimes blacks out the sky, and the children of rich families are educated via screen as anxiety and loneliness rise and rise. Instead, Klara’s world follows the vectors already in motion. Ishiguro’s futurism does not imagine a great rupture or an AI singularity.
In that book, the protagonist, Kathy H., is a clone waiting for her organs to be harvested in Klara and the Sun, Klara is an AF (artificial friend), a synthetic girl built as a companion to a child who will, inevitably, outgrow her. Ishiguro returns in Klara to ideas of disposability and service that he broached in his other sci-fi first-person narrative, 2005’s Never Let Me Go. The novel takes us inside the mind of that constantly refreshing patience, where at first it’s rather peaceful - until it’s chilling. Instead, Ishiguro sees a future in which automata simply keep doing what we ask them to do, placidly accepting the burden of each small, inconvenient task. But Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, his eighth novel and first book since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, issues a quieter, stranger warning: The machines may never revolt.
Dicks and Elon Musks of this world have spent decades trying to convince us that AI rebellion is inevitable. Surely, nothing truly intelligent would put up with us for long, and the Philip K. No matter how we ignore and abuse them, they never tire of our errors you can disobey the lady in your phone and blame her (loudly) for your mistakes, and she’ll recalculate your route without complaint. The boundless helpfulness of our female digital assistants - our Siris, our Alexas, the voice of Google Maps - has given us a false sense of security.
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