Abstract
If super AI becomes possible, what could be the relationship between humans and non-humans? Does love play an important role in it? What is the meaning of true love? Noted for writing “novels of great emotional force”, Kazuo Ishiguro in his most recent speculative fiction Klara and the Sun imagines a posthuman world in which enhanced transhumans, super AIs and ordinary human beings coexist and interact with each other. By focusing on the Artificial Friend Klara’s complex emotions, such as her sensitivity, pathos and altruistic love, which is in strong contrast to the possessive, overprotective, and self-centered love of Josie’s mother, this essay uses Michael Hardt’s concept of affective labor to ponder on the question of parental love and human and non-human relationship. It argues that as a companion robot, Klara’s affective labor makes her more humanlike, and that in the posthuman world where artificial intelligence can be ever more potent and inescapably change the human relations, the key to more constructive relationship is to cherish hope and show benevolent love to one another, whether they are humans, or non-humans.
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Notes
In what follows, the page number of the quotation from the novel will be put in parenthesis in the article.
Released on March 2, 2021, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kazuo-ishiguro/klara-and-the-sun/, accessed: October 18, 2021.
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Du, L. Love and hope: affective labor and posthuman relations in Klara and The Sun. Neohelicon 49, 551–562 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-022-00671-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-022-00671-9