Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, £20)
A recent BBC science report showed Pepper, a “culturally competent” robot, interacting with residents of a care home. One of them, Peter, was encouraged to reminisce about the war while Pepper, four feet tall and cute as a button, nodded encouragingly and blinked its big, Disney eyes. It seemed to be listening to Peter and perhaps it was also doing other useful things, like monitoring his blood pressure and heart rate, or checking for signs of macular degeneration. We’ve been anticipating and dreading the age of the robot for more than a hundred years. Now, in car plants and care homes, it’s finally dawning. How long before robots like Pepper acquire that quality we prize so highly in humans and fear in machines: emotional intelligence? Is it only a matter of time before Pepper can roll its neon eyes and say: “Oh please, not the doodlebugs again, Grandad”?
Klara, the robot at the centre of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Klara and the Sun, would never be so rude, but she does have abundant emotional intelligence. She’s an “artificial friend” or AF, designed as a companion for children of around 12 to 14. We first meet her and the other AFs awaiting purchase in a shop on a busy street somewhere like New York, perhaps at some point in the near future. The streets are a familiar tangle of traffic and roadworks, and shoppers still carry takeaway coffees, but society has undergone sinister changes. Swathes of people have lost their jobs and some are living in secure communities, arming themselves against violent attack. Children, in particular, live with horrifying new pressures.