(Slight spoiler warnings)
A couple of months ago, I finished the sophomore summer reading book, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Our class had a lot of interesting discussions on their personal experiences with the book. However, after much retrospective on the book as a whole, there are quite a few problems I had with how the book conveyed some of its themes and messages.
For a bit of context, Klara and the Sun is told from the perspective of Klara, an artificial intelligence who is bought by a girl named Josie to be her companion until she goes off to college. However, very soon Josie becomes gravely sick due to her genetic modification. It contains a lot of unique messages and themes about what makes someone human, social inequality, and dealing with grief. While these were very profound concepts, some of the themes were a bit underdeveloped.
The biggest offender I found of this was the character of Mr. Capaldi. He was introduced in order to show how AI can’t replace a true relationship with a human. He had been working on a replica of Josie for her mother if she were to die from her sickness. This could’ve been a really interesting conflict for Josie’s mom, with her having to choose to preserve her daughter artificially or to hold on to the memory of their human relationship. But with Josie being magically revived from her sickness in order to throw in a happy ending, this urgent decision isn’t really developed or tested. The replica is never really mentioned again after this scene, and Mr. Capaldi only shows up again very briefly at the end after Josie is better. As sad as it would’ve been, having Josie pass away at the end would’ve made for a way more impactful ending, with this conflict that the mother is facing being pushed to its fullest potential. The ending we got kind of makes the conflict the mother was facing regarding the replica a bit pointless. This overall resulted in a pretty disappointing ending to the story, and it left a lot to be desired.
This isn’t just a problem with the ending; all throughout the story this idea of AI never really gets explored. The book told from the perspective of Klara, the AI itself, seems like a great way to further this theme, but the perspective comes off more as a naive child. She is perfectly capable of understanding human emotions, and we don’t really get much uniqueness to this style of narration. It isn’t really mentioned or implied how humans and AI are different from each other, and this should’ve been a very important idea to convey. I honestly feel like a perspective from one of the human characters, like Josie or her mother, would’ve made for a more impactful message about how AI can never take the place of a human. However, if this book was going to be told from the perspective of an AI, the narrative tone should’ve been way more unique, and because of this, the message wasn’t really able to be fully fleshed out.
Overall, while I do think that Klara and the Sun has a lot of really good and unique ideas, the execution falls a bit flat. We now live in a world where AI is becoming more prevalent, and many people are concerned with how much it will take over our daily lives. This book certainly had good intentions but could have definitely been better developed in some of its themes about the role of AI. (By the way, I would definitely recommend watching M3gan, if you want to see some of these ideas of AI fully developed or just want to watch a really fun horror movie!)
