Klara and the Sun

In a future world where AI-infused robots are fashioned as children’s companions, Klara, one of these AI robots, narrates her experiences of the world as she sees it. Her charming perspective is from first principles, and it’s a curious exercise to interpret her thoughts much like how a little imagination is needed to understand a small child’s worldview. She’s adopted by a family whose child, Josie, is chronically sick, and over the course of the story, Klara becomes less of a robotic companion and more human as she witnesses Josie’s growth, her relationships with others, and her own nature as Josie’s companion. The story is subtle and provocative on questions of mortality. Weird at times, it questions the many assumed axioms about our current world.

Even though these AI companions probably were initially designed to bring their users joy, it’s their use in how people deal with grief that’s most profoundly explored in the work. As the novel progresses, Chrissie, the mother who buys Klara for Josie, reveals her grief at the death of another child she had, Sal. Faced with the possibility of Josie’s death, we realized that Chrissie wanted Klara to be a backup plan to memorialize Josie forever, to take on Josie’s face and mimic her tics and live on as Josie when the real one dies; to become a vessel for her love and a respite from her grief of losing another child. Klara, in the end, doesn’t think she can really “be” Josie, yet even an imperfect technology could serve as a salve for human emotion that’s too hard to bear. In our world, it’s a matter of time before AI companions are mature enough to serve these wants, and though their creators may think of serving happiness to their users foremost, perhaps the more crucial work for these companions is more to serve as emotional rescuers for humans who are broken and grieving and sad, being a satisfactory but unideal imitation of what humans are to each other. There’s poignancy but also realism in the story that humans want to use robots, these imperfect imitation of life, to anesthetize themselves against the more unendurable pains and griefs in reality.