In his latest novel, “Klara and the Sun,” Kazuo Ishiguro turns his focus to artificial intelligence.
In his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ishiguro insists he is an optimist about technology. “I’m not one of these people who thinks it’s going to come and destroy us,” he said in a recent interview in December about his latest work, his lockdown reading list, and his fears about the future.
As with many of his previous works, the book doesn’t fit neatly into one genre but has elements of science fiction and also works as a coming-of-age tale.
The story follows Klara, an intelligent robot known as an “artificial friend,” who joins a human family in a dystopian America in a deeply disturbing novel about human cloning.
What he fears, Ishiguro explained, is the devastating injustice that may result if society isn’t careful with scientific progress as he rattled off a list of promising breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and genetics.
“We’ve all got to start to think and worry about these questions,” he said, “because at the moment, they’re in the hands of very, very few people.”
