Can robots be loved? On Ishiguro's "Klara and the Sun"

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a precedent in classical literature, when Homer tells in The Iliad how Hephaestus, the blacksmith of the gods, sculpts two maidens in gold whom he endows with understanding and speech, to keep him company in his celestial but lonely forge. 

In the modern age, we also know that many developments in AI are aimed precisely at overcoming loneliness or homesickness. Among the recent innovations that has attracted widespread attention are chatbots patented by Microsoft, which generate a digital reincarnation of people, living or dead, from social data - images, voice, posts or emails, among others. Some people find these chatbots disturbing; others see them as an opportunity to relive memories of loved ones. 

The protagonist of Klara and the Sun, the latest novel by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, is a modern version of a robot that is sophisticated, kind, observant and gifted with understanding. She belongs to the AA category, whose role is to care for the minors assigned to them. In Klara's case, she is chosen in the robot store by Jossie, a chronically ill girl, for whom she becomes a friend, companion and caregiver.

How do robots feel and think? Ishiguro does an outstanding job of making Klara the first-person narrator and describing her one-way feelings, strong sense of duty, her mathematical perception of the external world, her candor and absence of malice: a prodigy of AI. As some of the characters comment, Klara has developed an exceptional sensitivity for her nature: some other specimens of the AF class have a more superficial understanding, and those of the more evolved B3 class can be downright perverse.

There are two clear traits in Klara's behavior that can be seen as manifestations of machine learning. The first is a quasi-religious obsession with the healing properties of the sun on people and robots. She arrives at this belief by association with circumstances she has experienced, for example, her robot companions that are powered by solar energy; or the awakening of a homeless man she thought dead at the first rays of sunrise. These episodes capture Klara’s imagination and lead her to the conviction that Jossie will be cured if she is exposed to enough sunshine.

Klara’s other robotic trait is the logic that underpins her reasoning, sometimes with philosophical depth. Well into the novel we learn that Jossie's mother has bought Klara to become a clone of Jossie when she dies, to learn to move, behave and think as her daughter would. Fortunately, this never comes to pass, because of Jossie's solar healing, but what is interesting is Klara's reasoning about how illusory the replacement would be. She explains that even if she had learned to copy all facets of Jossie's personality, spoke and thought like her, there would be something special that was impossible to imitate. However, that special something was not within Jossie, which could be replicated, but was within the people who loved her.

Klara’s concerns bring to mind Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, where she proposed that the individual's inner life, the personal conception of the world and of people, is the best basis for any philosophy. In her opinion, science is insufficient to explain the beliefs, aspirations, feelings and contradictions of the individual. The moral behavior of people cannot be reduced to scientific arguments, taken for example from genetics and psychology, or in today's terminology, taken from the analysis of "big data", or from all the information that Klara could process about Jossie, and replicate it. 

To illustrate the importance of the inner life of the individual in the articulation of a moral vision, Murdoch raises the analogy of the mother-in-law. She explains that in most such relationships, mothers-in-law feel a certain animosity toward their daughters-in-law. This stems from a love for their own children, a belief that no one deserves them, and other related feelings. However, Murdoch explains that there is a chance to reverse this feeling, to change that negative portrayal. If the mother-in-law tries to highlight all the positive aspects of her daughter-in-law, strives to change her opinion of her perceived shortcomings, or even justifies them, she may lessen her animosity. Let's imagine that the mother-in-law will make an effort every day to see some positive facet of her daughter-in-law, and interact with her as she would with her own daughter, overlooking misunderstandings and lavishing praise on her and making gestures of affection. With the passage of time, it is to be expected that the mother-in-law will change her opinion about the daughter-in-law and end up loving and respecting her. In this sense, Murdoch explains that the only way to understand people or things, to know them fully, is to love them, which is the result of that inner exercise of seeing them in their best light, from their best angle. "We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned today by philosophers, can once again take center stage," she writes (1).

This inner world is what gives meaning to our affections, to the affection we feel for other people, and what makes it difficult, if not impossible, to simply transfer love from one person to another. There is always a certain solipsism in any relationship of affection, that the love we profess for others is requited. 

The allegorical style of Klara and the Sun is reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, where the eponymous character ponders on how unique affection for a singular person or thing is. The Little Prince has just encountered some roses and realizes that "his rose" is not unique. Nevertheless, he turns to them and says: "To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you — the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.” (2)

Notes

(1)I. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good  

(2)A. De Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince