Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Book Review)

Warning: Some spoilers in this video.

Hello everyone and welcome to my new life lessons learned from Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. This book is one that you keep thinking long and hard about after you have read it. It brings up more questions than answers and more gaps that you may want filled but with which the author gives us the leeway to come up with our own assumptions of a near-future society.

The reason I read this book is that it's our local library Book Club book for February 2023 (and I did also read Never Let Me Go late in 2022). It's a book for these times. The themes (and there are many) relate to love (in different forms), gratitude, genetic modification/engineering, AI, pollution, future society (fractures between groups of people; and within family groups based on certain decisions made around genetic uplifting) and loneliness.

Even now, as I write this description, I still think I'm barely scratching the surface. It's a book that makes you think about the impact of smart technologies (like AI) into society and how they will impact or create distinctions between the 'haves/have nots'. It also makes you question, "what makes us human", and why we would need to create artificial human-like bots to have the same emotions and feelings that we need to experience and show as human beings.

I began to feel empathy for the bot, Klara and yet at the same time, I questioned myself, why. What is it about these 'human looking' bots that triggers compassion towards it and where you may blur the lines between what it is, what it's for and it's use. Do we, should we, treat them differently than humans? Big big questions and ones that we are only just now also beginning to explore as people grapple with AI such as ChatGPT which is currently a hot topic.

A book for today's time - a book with no real answers, just more questions of how are we to live in a world of change, in a world where we have elected technology to be more prevalent at the expense of our human relationships. A zero sum game, I'm afraid.

Life lessons:

(1) What do you think about artificial intelligence? What about if it's presented in human format?
(2) Would you treat a human looking bot like a human? Replace it for humans? See it as a utility?
(3) How do you think AI will change society as a whole? How will it integrate with our human relationships with others? What if it creates a new class distinction in society?

On an aside, I've taken up more of a slow reading approach this year. I'm currently near the end of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace; reading poetry by Sylvia Plath (Ariel) which requires time to digest and decipher and these will be reviewed for what I have learned through them in due course.

Whatever book you have in your hands, hope it brings you some a ha moments for your life. Happy reading.

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