SEITE: 37/38
2 Kommentare
Stelle:
The beggar and his dog, resurrected by the sun.
Anmerkung:
Klara misinterprets the sleeping beggar and his dog as being dead, on a grey, gloomy afternoon. Next morning, they are alive, bathing in sunlight – Klara thinks that they have come back to live thanks to the light. Is it plausible that she doesn’t understands humans (and dogs) are not dependent of the sun like AFs are? How can she be a good AF for a child if she is not aware of this? Or will this be part of the fun for teenage kids to teach the AF such basic things?
I believe this is part of her childlike nature – Ishiguro introduces the idea of naive religion this way into the text. Klara runs on solar energy, so it is no wonder she invests the Sun with magical powers. But – from another angle – it is also a bit similar to the way „falling in love“ functioned as a magical element in Never Let Me Go, as a source of ungrounded hope.
Still not absolutely convinced (but you have the complete picture, of course): when (on page 43) Josie’s mother asks Klara questions about Josie, Klara seems to be very knowledgable about human anatomy and fitness (or tone pitches of the human voice, for that matter). I would have expected that she is also programmed to understand nutrition, microbiome etc,, in one word: how a human body functions. But admitted: she neither knows first that humans can get into a fight (she only learns that by observing two taxi drivers behaving strangely outside the shop-window). So there are knowledge gaps… And one wonders how they were defined – by another algorithm? In „Machines like me“, it is the owner of the robots defining their qualities (not sure if they can also limit what they know).