| Hi folks, it's Brad, with a rapturous recommendation of one of the best books I've read about the dawning age of artificial intelligence and its frightening implications: Kazuo Ishiguro's dark and thrilling Klara and the Sun. You can fill a library these days with serious non-fiction books that contemplate the history and ramifications of AI. (Here's a review of two excellent recent additions to the genre.) But there's nothing quite like a master novelist who can subtly disguise the most important questions within the folds of a gripping story. Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Never Let Me Go, a dystopian novel about clones coming to terms with their terrifying reality, has often worked at the fraught intersection of technology and humanity. Klara is narrated by a perceptive, child-like robot, or "artificial friend," who's for sale in a retail showroom that looks out onto a congested city street. Klara is eventually peddled to a family with a teenaged daughter, Josie, who is contending with serious health problems, the result of gene editing apparently meant to augment her intelligence and make her more employable in an AI-dominated world. That's the plot of the book, which I won't spoil any further. In an interview with Time magazine, Ishiguro says he's optimistic about the future of technology and that in the book he focused on "celebrating the things worth celebrating about human nature." But to me, the most salient message was a layer of more pessimistic commentary embedded deeper in the novel's backdrop, depicting a society that's profoundly conflicted about advanced technology. In the world of Klara, artificial friends are sold in conventional retail stores alongside glassware and other disposable knickknacks, a grim signal of how this society values these therapeutic AI companions. Robots are rarely seen outside, and even then, they're walking a few steps behind their masters. At the same time, people seem to have superstitious faith in their intelligence and some characters believe that Klara might have a mysterious reservoir of secret medical knowledge. In Ishiguro's conjuring, AI is also taking the jobs of even advanced engineers. These are obliquely referred to as "substitutions." In one brief scene, a character is asked to sign a petition to protect hundreds of "post-employed" people and their families from being evicted from their building. At another moment in the book, a character hopes that young people can "find a path through this mess we've bequeathed to his generation." One of the more comic aspects of Ishiguro's world is how everyone's social skills have atrophied because of dislocating technology, and been replaced by a kind of cruel narcissism. Kids learn from home on their phones or "oblongs" (Ishiguro was prescient if he completed this before the pandemic) and can't even congregate with each other without resorting to almost anarchic bullying. Even adult conversations seem to jump wildly between people's self-centered concerns. All of this is filtered through the muddied perception of the robot Klara, who herself isn't operating at peak capacity at points in the tale, but it lends the fictional world a kind of melancholic and disintegrating atmosphere. So is Ishiguro in fact warning us about the oncoming impact of powerful artificial intelligence and its potential to take away livelihoods and isolate people? Different characters seem to have different views. For example, Josie's father, an intellectually timid engineer who has lost his job to AI, seems to be receding into a heavily armed and ethnocentric community. But another character named Capaldi with an intensely creepy vocation believes that concerns over AI and robots can be addressed if only people understand them better. He seems to represent the high-tech faithful—and perhaps even the novelists and journalists who try to make sense of this exotic technology. "What [people] don't like are sealed black boxes," he tells Klara at one point, begging for a peek at her circuitry. "Okay, let's open them up. Once we see inside, not only do things get a lot less scary, we'll learn." —Brad Stone | 
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