Anything for You

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, artificial intelligence meets real sacrifice.

- By Helen Shaw

THE BOUNDLESS helpfulness of our female digital assistants—our Siris, our Alexas, the voice of Google Maps—has given us a false sense of security. No matter how we ignore and abuse them, they never tire of our errors; you can disobey the lady in your phone and blame her (loudly) for your mistakes, and she’ll recalculate your route without complaint. Surely, nothing truly intelligent would put up with us for long, and the Philip K. Dicks and Elon Musks of this world have spent decades trying to convince us that AI rebellion is inevitable. But Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, his eighth novel and first book since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, issues a quieter, stranger warning: The machines may never revolt. Instead, Ishiguro sees a future in which automatons simply keep doing what we ask them to do, placidly accepting the burden of each small inconvenient task. The novel takes us inside the mind of that constantly refreshing patience, where at first it’s rather peaceful—until it’s chilling.