Sameer Rahim

The robot as carer: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, reviewed

The Nobel prize-winner is the latest novelist to join the AI debate and the possibility of creating a sentient machine

Kazuo Ishiguro. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 06 March 2021

The world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel — let’s call it Ishville — is instantly recognisable. Our narrator, Klara, is arranging traumatic memories into comprehensible order. She is a robot, an Artificial Friend or AF, purchased as a companion for an ill teenager named Josie. Klara’s speaking voice, in a C3PO-ish way, is endearingly off-kilter: ‘I was instructed to ensure against hanky-panky.’

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