What lies in store as robots become human
Which of these is more difficult: for a robot to write a book that reads as if it was written by a human, or for a human to write a book that reads as if written by a robot?
We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see how the robots get on – but the author of Never Let Me Go and The Remains Of The Day has attempted the latter task in his new novel, the first since he won the Nobel Prize in 2017.
The narrator is Klara, an “Artificial Friend”: a solar-powered robot designed to be a humanoid doll-turned-servant.
We first meet her in a store in an unnamed American city, hoping a family will take her home to live with them. One day, she establishes a connection with teenager Josie.
But when Josie fails to return to the store, Klara becomes resigned to remaining on the shelf for ever.
Eventually, however, Josie comes back after a period of ill health and Klara goes to live with her and her mother. Initially, Ishiguro teasingly withholds a lot of key information about this version of the not-toodistant future.
But readers gradually learn, along with Klara, about the huge sacrifices people now make to survive and why they have taken such a toll on Josie’s health.
As Klara tries to help Josie get well, the book invites us to think about the moral issues that may face us in years to come. For example, when we can programme robots to think and feel like humans, will we not then have a duty to treat them like humans?
Klara is so engaging a character that most readers will want to believe of her what we want to believe of ourselves – that emotions such as love and loyalty are more than just the sum of our internal wiring.
Ishiguro pulls back from a full exploration of some of the darker issues he raises.
But a story that could easily be unbearably sentimental in another writer’s hands becomes genuinely moving, even beautiful, in Ishiguro’s unostentatious but perfectly judged prose.