Kazuo Ishiguro’s eye for the future teaches us about Covid-19
Isolation, loneliness, home schooling, artificial intelligence. The novelist is a master at focusing on the big issues of the ‘new normal’.
Kazuo Ishiguro finished his latest novel, Klara and The Sun, before the pandemic that disrupted almost everything the world took for granted.
The acclaimed writer set his work in the “near future”, but it was still somewhat disconcerting to witness world events unravel as if lifted from the page, just as the book hit our shelves and devices.
Ishiguro was linked into the Sydney Writers’ Festival by video to talk about the big themes of artificial intelligence, loneliness and human isolation at the heart of his book.
He told the audience that he writes, not so much with an eye to engaging the reader, but asking himself the question of what readers are left with when they finish his work.
We are left with plenty from this story of Klara, the artificial friend, the robot, a living doll designed to ease children’s loneliness and one that is programmed to learn an approximation of human emotions.
Ishiguro is widely known — not only from his books, but from two of their movie adaptations, Never Let Me Go, and The Remains of the Day, the latter starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Critics acclaim the Japanese-born British author as one of the great writers of our time. The judges who awarded him the Nobel prize for Literature in 2017 said he was one “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.
Readers familiar with Ishiguro’s works know his stories vibrate long after the last page is read.
The logical and emotional fog of works like The Unconsoled or The Buried Giant is hard to shake, similarly the emotional impotence of the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day. The organ donor children in Never Let Me Go are unforgettable.
In Klara and The Sun (Allen & Unwin) he demonstrates again an uncanny feel for the issues facing the world in 2021, even though the book was written before we had even heard of COVID-19.
In the book, the robot Klara and her type are designed for “lifted” children who are home-schooled on “oblongs” in an atomised society. The “lifted” are given the advantages of an elite stream in this remote education system. They are trained and groomed for a higher calling while others must make do with a less promising future. And the Artificial Intelligence that drives Klara leads to hints of unemployed armed groups vowing to fight for what they have left.
There are no pandemics, but this is a near future that feels all too real and all too immediate at a time when the virus condemned our children to home-schooling and many of us to what one English friend describes as “this crippling loneliness” of lockdowns. In America, meanwhile, the disenchanted, believing they had been disenfranchised, rose up and marched on the Capitol.
It is a risky business placing your fiction in a near future for fear of incurring the very redundancy that is another theme of the novel, but the author summons a tale that is universal and timeless. It asks what separates humans from beasts and machines: is there a soul, a heart, a higher consciousness that can’t be replicated or approximated by algorithm?
In the novel, Klara learns (human) emotion through inquiry and observation. At times she seems to feel them too.
In a recent interview with The Economist, Ishiguro said: “Does she (Klara) have empathy, does she actually understand human emotions or is she just observing human emotions and therefore to some extent simulating them?
“It’s hard to know, it becomes a very interesting question for us and for Klara herself and so she focuses on questions like that.
“What are human emotions and how (do) they work? In particular she is fascinated by human loneliness because that is the reward function that is built into her to stop teenagers from becoming lonely.”
The mother who buys Klara for her child, Josie, says to the “artificial friend” that she envies the fact she has no feelings.
“I believe I have many feelings,” the machine responds. “The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.”
Josie’s mother is tormented by regret and anguish over whether she has done the right thing for her child. Josie’s disenfranchised father, one of the group on the edge of society, shrugs off the unemployment forced by AI, saying that “everyone had to find new ways to live their lives”.
The new normal.
To view Ishiguro’s work as a simulacrum of the times sells it short, however. The author is engaged with bigger themes of loneliness and what it means to be human. He worries humans are unique, so extraordinary in their individual ecosystem, that they can never relate to another and are condemned to loneliness. The rise of algorithms that approximate emotion challenges our definitions of humanity.
Ishiguro is — a little like master short-story teller William Trevor — adept at gesturing towards the sinister or the disastrous.
In his video link to the writers’ festival last week, he said he had toyed with a tragic end for Klara but tries to avoid such “sentimentality”, eschewing endings sad or happy. He wants to create a work that doesn’t end with the last twist of a plot, he said.
The reader meets Klara in a department store where, like puppies in a pet shop, the Artificial Friends await purchase by a passing child.
Robots — Ishiguro says they are more like a child’s doll or a soft toy than your standard science-fiction machine — are wired to attend to the child’s emotional needs. They do not run errands, but they do approximate friendship.
A friend who lives in the US complained late last year that his young daughter had not seen a child her age for the best part of six months.
Like others around him, he was forced to choose a small circle of friends, carefully monitored because of the dangers of infection, in order for the child to socialise.
The Mayo Clinic advised parents to help their children beat the depressive effects of the loneliness by adopting a pet and encouraging interaction via video.
In an early scene from the novel the parents of other children arrive at Josie’s for an “interaction” — a staged socialising process for the students ahead of higher studies. Josie is reluctant and her mother explains: “This crowd happens to be your peer group. And when you get to college, you’ll have to deal with all kinds. By the time I got to college, I’d had years of being alongside other kids each day. But for you and your generation, it’s going to be pretty tough unless you put in some work now.”
Ishiguro is the most understated of authors. There is a politeness to his prose and restraint in his narrative that readers will recognise from Stevens in his 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day. The characters who tell his stories are usually outsiders who have a slight disconnect with the world they describe, and so it is with Klara, who is learning the manners of the humans she lives among. Ryder, his narrator in the epic 1995 novel The Unconsoled, is described by his wife as a man “outside of love”.
Klara is also a convenient device to explore what it is that defines us as humans. It is a question that has occupied minds as far back as we can explore but one put into a new context by the possibilities of AI. In science fiction, AI is a monster that rises up against its creator generally through acquiring intellectual superiority. Ishiguro’s concerns are more practical.
He suggests AI is more advanced than we realise and the genie is not going back into the bottle. But for him the greatest concern is the traumatic effect on employment as more of us are replaced by machines.
As the story reaches a dramatic climax outside a theatre, several protesters are on the footpath, apparently upset about the state of the world and their own redundancy. One woman approaches the humans standing with Klara. She assumes the robot is going to the theatre and complains: “First they take our jobs, then they take our seats at the theatre.”
The book predates the rushing of the Capitol but offers an almost sympathetic rendering of the dispossessed who were among the crowd that day. One character explains why his group is armed: “There are different groups where we live, I’m not denying it. I didn’t make the rules and it’s just the way it naturally divided. And if another group won’t respect us, and what we have done, they need to know they’ll have a fight on their hands.”
When Ishiguro won the Nobel prize for Literature, his acceptance speech was a gentle, self-deprecating document.
“I’ve been emphasising here the small and the private, because essentially that’s what my work is about,” he said. “One person writing in a quiet room, trying to connect with another person, reading in another quiet — or maybe not so quiet — room. Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me, the essential thing is that they communicate feelings. That they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. There are large, glamorous industries around stories: the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”