Klara and the Sun, published in 2021, was the eighth novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British
novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Highly anticipated, the dystopian science fiction sets in the U.S. in an
uncomfortably near yet unspecified future: technology has rendered many people “postemployed”
and created a blunt caste system where the so-called “lifted” are on top. With this wide-focus social
backdrop of this novel, most of the time the story is told from a very limited point-of-view of Klara,
a solar-powered AF—Artificial Friend. As a companion robot, Klara is highly different from her own
kind: she has an appetite for observing and learning, and has the most sophisticated understanding
amongst all the AFs sold in the store. She is chosen by a very sickly fourteen-year-old Josie to be her
companion. Klara is loyal and tactful, and she is able to absorb difficulty and return care. Her role, as
she describes it, is to prevent loneliness and to serve. As a companion robot, Klara has a deep
reverence for the sun, which she regards as a deity. Solar-powered herself, Klara comes to believe
that attention to sun should be a matter of survival for humans. Throughout the novel, Klara is on a
mission to help Josie restore her health from a mysterious, seemingly terminally-ill disease, and she
believes the sun possesses the power to cure Josie.
     Ishiguro’s readers are no strangers to the recurring theme from his previous works—loss, regret,
sacrifice, longing, and a sense of reality afloat. And this novel is no exception. In Klara and the Sun,
however, technology takes a more central role, and Ishiguro uses artificial intelligence, both
biological and mechanized, to reflect on what it means to be human. Ishiguro uses the novel to contest
the idea: “Can AI actually get to that empathy by understanding human emotions?” The current
society seems to embrace artificial intelligence wholeheartedly, and allows AI to creep into every
aspect of society, from job applications, to data mining with algorithms, or even to medicine in clinical
setting. As the nature of this generation of machine learning, known as “reinforcement learning”, is
vastly different from that of the old forms of AI, human beings may lose control of what AI does
thereafter. With this novel, Ishiguro intends to manifest a dark allegory that speaks about the danger
of unchecked technological advances, the loss of innocence, and the dignity of simple lives. Although
the novel concludes with a positive note in believing how AFs like Klara would be able to provide
unfailingly considerate and loyal companionship, the hauntingly beautiful story subtly addresses
various looming challenges and controversies regarding AI ethics such as the limitations of machine
learning and unsupervised deep learning. Many questions remain unanswered in the novel. But what
is beyond doubt here is that Ishiguro has produced another masterpiece, a work that depicts the
tenderness, beauty and fragility of humanity through the eyes of an AI.
【題組】46. Which of the following titles suits this article best?
(A) Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun imagines a world full of human clones
(B) Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun presents a future without human beings
(C) Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun explores artificial intelligence and human hearts
(D) Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun exemplifies the grave dangers of artificial intelligence
(E) Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun manifests a utopia where artificial intelligence governshuman beings