From her place in the storefront window, she tries to reason out her world. The fun of this novel is that Ishiguro imagines the iterative, interactive process of machine learning as a kind of fairy tale heroine’s quest. This is typical Ishiguran irony: in the future, we have replicated consciousness-but we still don’t understand it. Created in our image, they are as mysterious to us as we are to each other and to ourselves. And she runs an algorithm complex enough to render her and the other AFs “sealed black boxes,” in one character’s words, to the people who programmed her.
She can recognize and respond to human emotions.
Readers might recognize her as a plausible evolution of today’s artificial intelligence technology: she can walk, talk, and learn.
Designed to keep children company, she spends the first weeks of her life in a store, waiting to be bought. Klara, Ishiguro’s narrator, is a robot-an AF, or Artificial Friend. What can robots know? Then again, what can people know? These are the questions-and maybe they’re really the same question-at the core of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, Klara and the Sun.
0 kommentar(er)
