Written before
It’s been a long time since I’ve written about reading, I think the last time I wrote about it was in high school, I’ve read a lot of books and periodicals from elementary school to high school and it’s these books that have shaped a part of my personality, so I have to thank these books, as well as my mom, dad, grandma, and teachers who have given me the conditions to read.
About the book Clara and the Sun, it took almost a year from the time I bought it to the time I finished reading it. I bought it in Shenzhen and finished reading it in Shanghai, and during that time I changed jobs and experienced the year 2022, when a lot of things seemed to have happened and nothing seemed to have happened at all.
As for why it took me a year to finish it, I believe modern people can understand, because cell phones and computers have taken over our work and life, and it’s not easy to pick up paper books again. But when I think about it, I can actually read some of it every day and finish it very quickly. In the end, I’m still lazy, but after all, it’s the first paper book I’ve read in its entirety in the past few years, so it’s worth commemorating.
What is Clara
Clara is a solar-powered, artificially intelligent robot designed to accompany children with a high level of observation, reasoning and empathy. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s interview, he has mentioned that he is concerned and even worried about the development of artificial intelligence, but I personally believe that human beings have to understand the key factor of the mechanism that generates intelligence in order to be able to produce robots with the ability to empathize, and we are still a long way away from that step.
Obviously then in the book human society already has the ability to produce such robots and is upgrading them, since Clara isn’t one of the latest models. And it’s not surprising to see by the end of the book that this has become an assembly line, from production to putting them into stores to depreciation and recycling. Another important point is that these robots will only ever be single-mindedly devoted to their masters and are 100% altruistic. This is evident in the fact that Clara would rather lose her oil (similar to humans donating blood and organs) than realize a possibility that is not proven to help Clara’s condition.
So back to the point in the book where Mr. Capaldi and the Josie family are arguing: _Can AI robots really replace humans? _ This is actually a question that the author puts to the reader, and my answer is no. There is a sentence in the translator’s afterword that I think is particularly good, and I’ll excerpt it here: _It is precisely because of the coexistence of selfish desires and aspirations for sublimity that the human heart is full of contradictions, uncertainty, and anguish; and without the downward gravitational force of selfishness, all the lofty, upwardly mobile human nature would be so empty as to have lost its weight. _ And then Capaldi went to Chrissie, wanting to do reverse engineering on her to appease the people in society who are worried about AI, which shows that Capaldi thinks that AI is still programmable and derivable, so is this not a contradiction to what he said about AI being able to replace human beings? Doesn’t it show that Capaldi doesn’t actually feel in his heart that he can replace humans with a robot, but maybe he just wants to make money.
What is the sun
Getting back to this book, I read this book in a library bathed in afternoon sunshine, while probably surrounded by a lot of new crown-positive patients, so what is the sun in this book?
The naive Clara (the AI robot) believes that the sun has magical powers and can cure illnesses, and the fact that Josie does in fact get better after basking in the sunshine sets the stage for this being a fairy tale, as it is well known that the sun does not cure illnesses. However, for Clara, the sun provides her with energy, so for her the sun is the God in her heart, similar to the Christian God in human society, or the Buddhist Rudra, and so on. So when we go to temples or draw crosses on our chests, are we not also naive?
Of course, in addition to the physical sense of the sun, there is another important point, that is, love, whether it is Clara to Josie, or Rick to Josie, or Chrissie to Josie, it is love , a kind of warmth like the sun to warm us but invisible to touch.
It’s because of these loves that there is a perfect ending in the end. This reminds me of Nolan’s Star Trek, a movie that perfectly illustrates what it means to say that “love” can travel through time and space.
About the ending
I’m one of those people who likes a good ending but doesn’t want a good movie to fall into a rut, not out of any conceit that I can see through it all, or because I’m influenced by statements like “comedy is tragedy at its core”. It’s because I always believe that a good work, book or movie, needs to leave a certain amount of space for the reader and the viewer to imagine, something like “white space”.
And this ending, indeed, made me think a lot, not limited to the book. First of all, referring to Kazuo Ishiguro’s daughter’s comment that this is not a fairy tale for children to read, it is too dark, so I thought of a game I played in my senior year of college: Fran Bow, also a very dark game in terms of both graphics and story, and the players’ interpretations of the game’s ending are also diverse, some people think that the whole process is a fantasy of Fran, some people think that in the end Fran does go to the end of the world, and some people think that in the end, Fran does go to the end of the world. Some feel that in the end Fran does go to an ideal world, but as the game ends with the line:
_“I still don’t know many things…” _
_“But one thing I do know…” _
_ “That between guilt and fear…” _
_ “I choose happiness…” _
Yes, you can choose a happy ending. There’s no right or wrong.
That’s why I also prefer to believe that Clara stayed with Josie through her childhood, fulfilled her mission, and spent her final moments happily reflecting on what had been, and isn’t that what we want as human beings?