[Reading Record] The Shape of This World as Seen by an AI

"Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro
Finished reading. (I have written this to the point of being on the verge of spoilers, so please be careful if you have not read it yet.)

A rough summary of the content

The setting is the near future, not too far from now, in an English-speaking country that is not the UK. Klara, an AF (Artificial Friend), a humanoid android equipped with AI, is purchased by the home of a sickly girl named Josie. In fact, the family has a secret...

The sense of "wavering" does a very good job

I read the same author's "The Remains of the Day" before this, but I gave up halfway through because the pacing felt too slow. However, I really liked the character descriptions of the protagonist, so this time I decided to read a work with a completely different setting (near-future, dystopian).

This work also unfolds in the first-person narrative of the protagonist, Klara. Not only is Klara's own personality well-defined, but the character descriptions of the living humans as seen through the eyes of an AF are excellent. In particular, humans have unpredictable "waverings" of emotion and temperament that Klara, as an artificial object, does not have, and scenes where Klara delicately reads these are scattered throughout, drawing the reader in.

Klara is an artificial object, and although she is a model on the verge of being discontinued, the setting is that she is a rare AF with higher learning capabilities compared to other models of the same type. AFs are sold in stores with display windows, and naturally, many customers (children) want the latest models. However, the scene where Josie and her mother decide that Klara, whom they met and talked to at the store once, is the one they want, and come back later to search for and buy Klara, who had been moved to the back of the store, is impressive. It shows that performance is not "stereotypical and the same for every model," nor is it the case that "old models are no match for the latest models." I liked that there was a kind of "wavering" here as well.

What lies behind Klara's "wavering" and stoicism

Because Klara is an AF, she is depicted as having a neutral, stoic personality. On the other hand, she performs certain (one could say religious) actions to pray for Josie's recovery, and shows human-like movements of the heart, such as hesitating on how to react to phenomena occurring before her eyes. I think these are all elements of Klara's "wavering" that deviate from neutrality. It feels more like a wavering of judgment rather than a wavering of emotion, and I feel it is slightly different from the wavering of living humans.

I feel that behind Klara's "wavering" is a devoted love for Josie. Basically, she is an AF who is obedient to the family that bought her and does not make presumptuous remarks or actions toward humans, but she has a stance of abandoning her own standards and crossing the line for Josie's sake, such as making quite strong requests to other humans to help her, or not responding to requests from others and watching Josie's condition until the very last moment even when she herself is in danger.

Because "for Josie's sake" is firmly at the base, she can take steps that a normal human would hesitate to take because their ego gets in the way. That is why, even in the ending scene of this story, Klara remains neutral, and I even feel that she seems cheerful (I will omit the details as it would be a spoiler).

Summary

After finishing it, it was a work that left me with a strangely warm feeling despite the sad ending. I felt this was because of the author's skill in character description, especially the way he depicts the movements of the human heart as captured through the eyes of an AF named Klara. Also, in this work, there is not just a simple contrast between "AI and humans," but there are other things being contrasted, which is also a quite important theme, but I would like to write about my thoughts on that if I have another opportunity.