BRAVE NEW WORLD
Kazuo Ishiguro explores the boundless possibilities of AI
It is the novelist’s central task to imagine how other minds work, to empathise, to understand those wholly unlike themselves. So perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the aspects of artificial intelligence that most fascinates Kazuo Ishiguro is the way in which it has become impossible – more swiftly than anyone predicted – to figure out how machines are thinking. It’s very difficult to avoid using that word.
When he and I talk, he gives the example of the games of Go played in 2016 between the reigning champion Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, a program developed by DeepMind, the world-leading British AI laboratory now owned by Google. AlphaGo won four out of the five games, but most importantly, it made a move in one of the games that no one anticipated. ‘The significance is that Go is not like chess,’ Ishiguro says. ‘It’s a much more complicated and intuitive game, it’s more like creating a piece of art. It was not only that people thought that it would take decades before a program could defeat a human player – but also that, when it happened, people couldn’t understand the method. There’s this now-legendary move that the software made, move 37, that occurred in the second game. All the commentators fell about laughing; they thought they were about to see something ridiculous, that the machine had made the most stupid move possible. And yet it proved to be absolutely crucial. The machine had invented a new style in a medium where new styles were thought to be impossible.’
We’re speaking about AI because it plays a central role in his new novel, Klara and the Sun. Klara, the novel’s narrator, is an ‘AF’ – an Artificial Friend. Like Never Let Me Go, the book is set in an undetermined future time, when the progress of AI means that robots can serve as valued human companions. It begins almost like an oldfashioned children’s story, with Klara waiting to be chosen by a customer, like a toy in a shop. She is picked by the teenager Josie and purchased by Josie’s mother. Gradually the reader learns that Josie has been ‘lifted’ – undergone an unspecified medical procedure – in order to give her some social or professional advantage. Lifting is not risk-free; Josie’s health is badly affected by it. As her AF, Klara is tasked with helping her. Poignancy comes from Klara’s singlemindedness, her commitment to Josie and her family, although her care and affection will never quite be reciprocated.
‘I’ve always been drawn to narrators who are outsiders,’ Ishiguro says. ‘Narrators who look at human beings afresh and think, “Oh, that’s interesting. I’m going to impersonate that.”’ One of the remarkable qualities of his work is the way in which his characters are compelling and yet somehow exist parallel to reality: Stevens the butler, in his 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the
Day, is unable to perceive either his employer’s fascist leanings or his own emotions. Kathy, the narrator of Never Let Me Go, published in 2005, remains at one remove from the fate of the cloned children under her care. This cool distance allows extraordinary space for the reader’s imagination and has made Ishiguro one of the most successful – and original – writers of his generation. In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature; two years later he was knighted.
But such accolades have not affected his working method or his demeanour. In person, he is down-to-earth, self-deprecating and open to a wide range of interests, from film to music, comic books and science. He had been interested in AI for a while before he began work on Klara and the Sun, he tells me. He had met Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind, at a conference a few years ago, ‘and we were joking around as to whether we could find an AI program that could write great novels. I proposed something called “Tolstoy 3” that would do exactly that.’ What fascinated Ishiguro was the idea that a machine would be able to learn on its own. ‘The main breakthrough is that this generation of AIs are just given a task and it’s left up to them how they solve it,’ he says. ‘We don’t know how they’re achieving what they’re achieving. We may well get to a point where we have to take their advice, but we have no idea why they’ve reached that conclusion.’ Everything the machine does is done simply with the aim of achieving a goal; but the way that goal is reached can happen any number of ways. Yet this leads to what he calls the ‘black box’ problem. The program could become ‘like a Delphic Oracle. It speaks, we don’t dare contradict it, but we don’t know why it’s telling us to do this’.
While he does think that the applications of artificial intelligence can be ‘fantastically positive’ – he points to the recent leap, made thanks to the use of AI, in ‘protein folding’, determining a protein’s 3-D shape from its amino-acid sequence, a process that may lead to a revolution in bioengineering, medicine and enable more advanced drug discovery – there are problems that sophisticated machine intelligence raises. One is the issue of mass unemployment; not just for workers with lower skills, but in professions such as law and medicine. ‘Why have a radiologist, when AI could crunch through millions of medical records?’ And then there’s Ishiguro’s imagined novel-writing software, Tolstoy 3: ‘It would not only write a convincing novel, it would write a new kind of novel. It would be Joyce all over again. A novel that was good in a way you’ve never seen before.’
This ability to create something really new – while terrifically exciting – brings another kind of threat. ‘Never mind novels,’ Ishiguro says. ‘It could come up with political ideas and understand how to market them. It could come up with a big idea, like communism. Or money. It could come up with something that was absolutely massive… something so far from imitation that people can’t even figure out how it’s done.’
These are concerns under discussion in the
wider scientific community. Over the past few years Ishiguro has also come to know Venki Ramakrishnan, the President of the Royal Society – the fellowship of eminent scientists – and, pre-pandemic, was invited to regular working lunches to consider matters such as this. ‘The community of science in general feels very urgently that some of these enormous breakthroughs in science and tech need to be discussed in the wider public, not just among scientists. This is true of the breakthroughs in genetic technology, too,’ he says. Many leading scientists believe that these developments will lead to seismic societal changes ‘equivalent to when we first had the steam engine’.
It is Ishiguro’s curiosity, his lifelong desire to learn, that makes him the great artist he is. He also likes to make it clear that he doesn’t work alone. When we spoke together for Bazaar back in 2015, he told me that the reason a decade had passed between Never Let Me
Go and his last novel, The Buried Giant, was because he had discarded a draft after his wife Lorna read 40 pages and said it was ‘dreadfully written’. Now, however, he has two in-house editors to contend with. He thought he was finished with
Klara and the Sun until Lorna told him it needed ‘tons more work’; he did all that work and only then gave it to their daughter, Naomi, to read. She told him there was yet more to do, and so back to his desk he went. Like her father, Naomi is a graduate of the MA degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia; her first book, a collection of short stories, was published last year; her debut novel, Common
Ground, will appear the same month as Klara and the Sun. ‘We’re fierce rivals,’ he says with a grin; but then gets serious. ‘She also was a tough editor,’ he tells me.
He’d meant to hand in the book last April, ‘but from the spring through to November, I was just doing the work I was told to do by members of my family!’
Klara and the Sun is haunting and tender. Ishiguro’s plain prose, clear as glass, has an extraordinary power to move. ‘There’s a language where you just hold everything back and the reader can come and fill that space with an emotion,’ he says. The Nobel Committee, in awarding him their prize, praised the ‘great emotional force’ of his work; the way in which it uncovers ‘the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’. And yet the sight of that abyss also provides a sense of connection; Ishiguro shows us how deeply we crave it. It is what Klara longs for. ‘I certainly wanted Klara, in a strange kind of way, to echo things from different stages of a typical human life,’ he tells me. We see ourselves through the eyes of Ishiguro’s thinking machine, and envision ourselves afresh.
‘Klara and the Sun’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (£20, Faber & Faber) is out now.