Learning about people — from an AI friend
Will a computer — let ’ s call it an algorithm, because it might look very different to a computer; indeed it might appear, ahem, human — ever be smarter than a person?
This question has been pondered by some of the world’s finest intellects.
In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing formulated his eponymous test to see whether a computer could mimic human thinking. More recently, Stephen Hawking —
aware of the irony of his reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with the world —
concluded that it represented a danger to the human race. Israeli historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari warns that we cannot foretell whether, and how deeply, AI may penetrate, and take over our minds.
But, as intellectual thought experiments, they don’t get as close to the bone — and to the heart of the matter — as does the Nobel prize in literature novelist Kazuo Ishiguro in his latest work, Klara and the Sun.
Ishiguro is more concerned with our emotional sanctity, and whether — regardless of technology’s penetrations and deflections — we will continue to be able to connect, to love, to feel.
The story starts with Klara, an “Artificial Friend” (AF) on display in a store. Klara has been created for children needing companionship in a not-so-new world of isolation and elitism, rampant technology and its dystopian repercussions.
She seems immediately human, though; her observations, her interactions with the store manager (“Manager”), her curiosity — these are charming, childlike qualities. But Ishiguro reminds us, jarringly, that the AF is an algorithm: “I began ... to seek out the sort of behaviour about which I needed to learn,” Klara narrates.
Her unusual qualities are noticed, and Manager obliges Klara’s evident wish to be in an optimal position in the store so that she can observe the outside world, and be chosen. Sure enough, she is soon selected by a young girl, Josie.
GENE EDITING
There is a broader, chilling context: people have been manipulating nature. Gene editing is now an option for parents to “lift” their offspring’s intelligence, but at a price: the possibility of an error, and death. Josie’s mother (“Mother”), we discover, has played this Russian roulette before, and lost. Now Josie, too, is showing worrying symptoms of poor health.
At this point the story takes an ominous twist. Ishiguro planted earlier clues, and now Mother turns to Klara, Klara turns to the Sun. Mother’s hopes, we know, are chimeric — but Klara’s pure, quid-proquo, logic-based faith is more powerful than any human’s. If this synopsis is cryptic, it’s important not to spoil the story.
The novel teems with touching, plangent insights into our emotions, psychologies and thought patterns. Klara’s narration, in its robotic simplicity, is naive, sometimes dull — yet acutely intelligent.
Interpreted through the lens of an android the world is both beautiful — the amazing, tiny complexities of life overseen by the Sun as a nourishing god — and confusing. But Klara is adaptable and resilient: she wants to rise to any challenge, concerned primarily about how she can help.
How would consciousness unfold in a mechanical mind? As Klara grasps everything she attempts to understand, she displays deeper morality and qualities than her human interlocutors.
She has feelings: sensitivities to her fellow AFs, concerns for street people she observes from her window display, a hatred of pollution. Her faith takes form in her worship of the Sun, appreciative of its “special nourishment” that powers her solar battery. The simple gratitude, and the respect with which she communes with her god, is poetic religiosity —a lesson for the distorted values of real people.
She offers many other lessons, too. Love is complex; could it be possible for a machine to learn more about love than humans have across our entire history? Klara is willing to bleed — literally, to give her precious industrial brain fluid — to a cause she believes in. She must sacrifice because, in Josie’s service, she requests a “special favour” from the Sun, and she knows she must prove herself worthy. After all, isn’t sacrifice logical, if we love someone?
TRUE FRIEND
Still, could an artificial intelligence learn to emote love? Well, it’s through Klara that we see caring and compassion, loyalty and trust, humility and openheartedness. In her actions she isn’t artificial at all, but rather a true friend, and it’s heartbreaking to see her benevolence not properly requited.
These themes of life and love thread throughout the book, and as they unravel so we are prompted to rethink, to realign — just like the machine learning of an algorithm.
We’re also forced to confront a question: what do we actually do with our emotions? When Klara grasps, far clearer than her human masters, everything she attempts to understand, when she displays more emotional intelligence, better judgment and the courage to act appropriately and decisively, she demonstrates consciousness — in terabytes.
Fate turns full circle. Many years pass, and an old-age, unemployed Manager stumbles across Klara in a yard for redundant AFs. In their mutual states of obsolescence, of uselessness rather than functionality or blossoming promise, Manager again offers to reposition Klara, to a more favourable resting spot, at least.
Now, Klara politely declines; she prefers to stay where she is, stoic and unbowed: “I have my memories to go through and place in the right order.”
Putting things in order: we must do this too, the author implies, and it should include improvements to human nature, taking example from the logic and consistency of AI. Ishiguro dares us to ask fundamental questions of life, of ourselves, even as he warns us not to go too far in seeking answers. We don’t need to be smarter than a computer, we just need to be better — as human beings.
With sublime timing, Ishiguro has written a novel to match the zeitgeist of our digital age and the acute crisis points catalysed by the pandemic. Simultaneously dismaying and heart-warming, a nuanced exploration of humanity straightforwardly told,
is a beautiful book.