Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the sun
A little boy whose mom was almost incinerated by the sun-hot bombing of Nagasaki. Two refugees shuttled to a foreign country and forced into alert observation of their new surroundings. Living alongside each other for 60 years until his mother's passing last year, the boy intellectualizing his grief into a journey of selflessness.
This isn't the story of Klara and the Sun. This is the story of its literary Nobel laureate author Kazuo Ishiguro. Under the right light this novel is as autobiographical as it is allegorical.
On the surface, Klara and the Sun shows off a functional utopia. Underneath, a moral dystopia. Usurped proletariats lying helpless as machines steal their livelihoods. liberal-humanist elites technologically enhancing themselves into a new species. And right in the center, our girlish A.I. companion protagonist watching it all unfold.
Crossing the threshold from artificial intelligence to consciousness is sci-fi's most well-worn trope for a reason: we're voyeurs addicted to the horror of imagining it actually happening. Spoiler alert: that ship set sail and already arrived at its destination.
The scientific community views consciousness as a black box because it's unwilling to proclaim the reality that there is no permanent self. Reducing the human experience down to a narrative moment-to-moment stream of noise amounting to nothing more than neural pollution is too nihilistic an admission for human thinkers. News flash: Duh.
The things that make this parable beautiful are the same things that make it paradoxical. A human writer can no better narrate the mind of a machine than they can the mind of whatever it is people think god is, and somehow I think that's also part of Ishiguro's lesson. Once we can be boiled down to a bunch of biochemical algorithms, it becomes difficult to justify our uniqueness from the machines we create to replace us.
As our artificially intelligent 1st person P.O.V. subtly implies, the folly of the future isn't that machines are becoming more like us. It's that we're becoming more like them.