Charles Petzold

The novels of Kazuo Ishiguro are mysteries of sorts. His narrators aren’t fully aware of what’s going on around them, and as they tell us what they see and hear, we readers need to read between the lines, piecing together hints that aren’t fully disclosed or understood.

In the case of the haunting Klara and the Sun, the narrator is particularly unreliable. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid artifical-intelligence entity, in appearance an adolescent girl, designed to be a companion to teenagers who tend to get lonely because they are tutored at home through computer instruction.

We know from the opening sentences that Klara has a human-like consciousness. The narrative would be impossible otherwise. Yet, we often recognize a peculiarity about it. Klara observes everything in great detail but often without discriminating what’s important and what’s not. Her visual processing is also odd: Sometimes her visual field fragments into boxes. It’s unclear whether this is a feature or a bug. She’s not the latest model.

I suspect that if given a human psychological test, Klara would be classified as being on the autism spectrum. But she is very good at keeping some of her more unusual mental patterns a secret. Because she runs on solar power, she has developed what seems to be a personal quasi-religious worship of the sun. But she doesn’t go into detail about this with others.

I am giving away nothing of the plot of Klara and the Sun. Part of the fun is seeing where Ishiguro takes us. But I was reminded of two classic concepts in the study of that difficult phenomenon of human consciousness. One is Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The short answer: We’ll never know. We get some insights into the workings of Klara’s consciousness from her narrative, and although Ishiguro reveals a lot, it’s still several steps away from an understanding what it’s like to be her.

Later, Klara is asked to perform a particular job, and what I thought of then was the famous thought experiment formulated by John Searle known as The Chinese Room, which explores the difference between authenticity and pretense in artificial intelligence. Klara herself seems confident that she would be able to perform this job. Others are not so sure. We readers are the most skeptical for we are privy to Klara’s thoughts.