Klara and the Sun

I have to admit that I’m really behind on my reading list this year, due to the amount of hours I poured into video games (I managed to beat close to 10 titles this year to date, thanks to the staycations I enjoyed dearly).

A few months ago, a coworker of mine recommended a book called Klara and the Sun; so I bought it the next day. I read a few pages around bedtime, but found it not particularly riveting - it was quite bland. So a few months later, I was still at page 20 or something. Then in a Sunday I decided I should really finish what I started, so I cut off my screen time that day from 9am to 9pm, and finally pulled it off.

What I am about to tell will entail some spoilers of the book. Since I hate to be spoiled myself, I’d like to extend the courtesy of not doing it. Consider yourself warned should you decide to keep scrolling down!

The Book

Here’s the edition I acquired:

The Story

The plot is actually not super complicated. The whole book is basically a self-narrated diary / memoir of an AF (Artificial Friend) named Klara, to look back her life spent in an unspecified city in an unspecified time in future.

This future society is obviously highly advanced so much so that AI had become sophisticated enough to be kids’ companions. The story began by Klara sharing her observations and “thoughts” by the store window, while she’s waiting to be sold. During that period, she had developed, if not pre-programmed, a worship towards the Sun. It’s fair enough given she’s perhaps solar-powered, in addition to what she observed as nourishing “miracles” performed by the Sun to the passers-by and strangers on the streets.

Given there were newer models available at the same time, the store manager had a hard time selling her. Luckily, eventually a teenage girl named Josie had developed affections towards Klara and picked her as AF.

Did I mention this society is very advanced in technology? Turns out AI wasn’t the only field these future human made a break-through - so did biotech evidently. Future human kids would have the option to be “lifted” (The author didn’t really explain, I had to deduce from later chapters), which I think is an eugenic procedure that could bring them genetic advantage to ensure their success when they grow up. In fact, the ones who didn’t get “lifted” would have a very slim chance to get into top schools, let alone moving up in the society. Yup, I think it’s exactly like what’s described in the great 1997 movie Gattaca. But there’s a catch, this “lifting” operation itself isn’t 100% safe. Josie had a sister who passed away due to a failure, and Josie herself had been sick constantly as a side-effect. As such, some parents chose not to get their kids “lifted” - Josie’s neighbor and best friend (and secret lover) Rick would be one of them.

Josie lives with her mother, as her parents would have been separated for some time. The mother seems to be a very successful and tough woman in the society (well I’d imagine these AFs must cost a bit). As Josie’s condition worsened, her mother had taken her to an “artist” for portraits. But only Josie was kept from the truth that these “portraits” weren’t actually paintings, but rather gatherings of information so should Josie dies one day in future, an AI would take her place and impersonate her to be the new Josie. Klara was asked to taken on this job and she accepted without hesitation.

Later on, it seemed that Josie became even sicker and was about to die any time soon. The story took a sharp turn when the Sun performed another “miracle” by sending his curing sunshine to Josie’s bed via the window opened by Klara. Josie gradually got well and recovered ever since that event.

As Josie got older and older, the day finally came when she was going to depart for college, leaving Klara behind. She and Rick also parted ways due to the fact that only one of the two was “lifted” and that they began to have different ideals and visions of their own lives.

Klara ended up in some scrap yard; she must’ve had her own fair share of “aging” as the years passed by. It’s not explicitly told but presumably she was abandoned. She reflected on her whole life and was happy with her memories. THE END.

There were also other characters and side stories but I think above is pretty much the gist. It’s worth mentioning that almost every human character seemed to be morally questionable and less likeable as compared these AFs.

Writing

Like I said, the book started off pretty bland but it did get more interesting. Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing style seemed to be that way - lots of dialogues; wording wasn’t badly sophisticated either. Initially I thought it was because Kazuo isn’t a native English writer (he was born in Japan, but moved to UK when he was a kid), but later I think it’s perhaps more intentionally that way to mimic the tone of an AF. I mean, who am I to speculate a Nobel laureate anyways. :D

Overall, I love the cold-ish feel of the writing. And I applaud Kazuo for not using too many archaic words. As a non-native English speaker, I oftentimes find some books tend to use an unnecessary amount of fancy words and cryptic sentence structures. I’m glad Klara and the Sun wasn’t one of them.

One bone I had to pick, is some acronyms or concepts (like lifting) weren’t explained beforehand, or at all. As a C++ programmer and a person with AMMNS (Acronyms Make Me Nervous Syndrome), I frown upon those who don’t declare things upfront! :)

My Takeaways

I’d give the book at least a B+ or even A-. Kudos for a good story well told. I like the many references to the worship of our mighty Sun¹ - we human should totally too! After all, the Sun is the ultimate power source of our planet and influences our measurement of time even.

I like the most the part where Klara was going through her life memories and had an epiphany:

Mr. Capaldi (i.e. the “artist” who was doing Josie’s portraits) believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr. Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.

This is so deep and yet relating. I found it somewhat resonating with what Coco the movie mentioned about different levels of death (Romans must’ve figured this out a long time ago since they had the punishment of Damnatio memoriae²):

When there’s no one left in the living world who remembers you, you disappear from this world. We call it the Final Death.

So really, what differentiates a real person and a highly advanced AI? Even if an AI can simulate what a person can feel (what’s “feel” to AIs anyways? are they truly sentient?) and can be “uploaded” with a real person’s entire life’s worth of memories, it’d still need to convince every other real human connections in order to be “recognized” and “accepted” to be one of the human. Touché!

So the takeaway to me is, memories and experiences are indeed the most precious thing to us real human beings - we oughta strive to live our lives to the fullest, create legacies and lasting memories, for ourselves and our loved ones as much as we could before we grow too old to do much, considering our life span is somewhat limited (at least for now until we can be immortal some day).

Immortality and Subscription

I personally think death is a great thing. It’s the ultimate equalizer - whether someone is a mighty king or a common citizen, they all have to face it some day. It puts a (random) finite TTL (time to live) / expiry date on every one of us, so we could have a sense of urgency and discipline to achieve meaningful things.

That said, what Klara initially was asked to do, i.e. taking on Josie’s memories and pretend to be her indefinitely, was an attempt to defy death by seeking immortality of some form. In fact, if you think about it, if you could upload your brain or memories, do you have to upload them to an android with physical forms? You could well upload to the cloud (something like Azure Human Memory Service in future, for only $29.99 per month), so you don’t have to worry about hardware maintenance and depreciation. I read somewhere some eccentric billionaire claimed he already did so (I remain skeptical).

But then you’d need to make sure you have left behind enough wealth or sustainable income to renew a subscription regularly and indefinitely (fees do tend to go up over time)! Imagine what they’d do to your memories (or the immortal you, so to speak) if you bank accounts come out short one day - something that had been depicted in Amazon Prime TV series Upload.

As a consumer, I am not really a huge fan of this idea of subscriptions. Not just cuz I’d need to pay a fee regularly (which is unpleasant ofc), but I prefer the feel of ownership much more than subscribing, which is essentially renting. For example, there were a couple great PlayStation games I initially played through as part of my PS Plus membership subscription but I bought them anyways just to “own” and collect.

Nevertheless, as an engineering professional in the tech industry, I can totally see the value of subscriptions to the business as they provide predictable and steady revenue streams. It also made a lot sense for cloud service providers as there’d be ongoing maintenance costs in the long run.

I, however, resent the idea of some carmakers trying to abuse this concept of subscriptions. It’s one thing to subscribe to a satellite navigation service, but a complete different another thing to have to pay recurring fees for hardware that buyers already paid for, such as paying an additional monthly fee just to heat seats³. I get that carmakers would be able to save a lot by mass-ordering standardized parts so they can pre-install everything and then sell different features à la carte by subscriptions. But that’s just not right. We did buy the car, which means the parts would need to be included. As a driver myself, I dread this would become a new industry norm. Ownership matters!

But taking a step back, part of me thinks the idea of ownership is perhaps also a “scam”. Since we don’t really live forever, we can’t practically own anything in perpetuity right? Maybe it’s just like the famous tag line of Patek: you never actually own anything; you merely look after them for the next generation. :)

Think about it - do you really own your home? Even if you manage to pay off all your mortgages, you’d still need to pay property taxes and other fees every year for as long as you “own” it in your life. The moment you can’t pay, they’d put a lien on it and perhaps next thing you know would be foreclosure. In a way, you’re paying a subscription fee to the civil services.

Do you really own your iPhone? There’s this thing called planned obsolescence, a business strategy⁴ in which the obsolescence (the process of becoming obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer usable) of a product is planned and built into it from its conception, by the manufacturer. Apple ain’t even trying to hide the intention - there’s this so-called iPhone Upgrade Program you can subscribe to, where you can get a new iPhone every year by trading in the previous generation. I meant, how is this environment-friendly?

Although, on the other hand, could we human be under planned obsolescence too by our creator so immortality was never meant to be achieved?

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