THE ETHICAL AND EMOTIONAL DYNAMICS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S KLARA AND THE SUN

Abstract

This paper employs the Foucauldian theory of panopticism and the Kristevan concept of intertextuality, with an aim of exposing surveillance, ethics and some emotional underpinnings of Artificial Friends (AFs) and their relation to other entities in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Focusing on the given novel, the objective of the paper is to critically consider how the novel’s main AF, Klara, performs technologies of the self, namely power; observing; and self-policed; and where it also provides the ground for ethical concerns over the subject and agency and affection. The present paper therefore seeks to demonstrate how this novel does this; in doing so, it advances a critique of the technologization of affect and relations, and in so doing offers something more valuable: unique and novel conceptions of time and emotional relations in response to others. It is said in the paper that it is also an angry text, revealing a society’s simple-mindedness in terms of surveillance and technology, as well as stressing on human touch in this technological period.