The “Frankenstein Complex”—a term coined by Isaac Asimov—is a familiar science fiction trope: a human creates a robot to act as an artificial human, but the robot takes it all too literally, eventually demanding to be treated as the real thing. Death, destruction, longing, rejection, or despair ensue when said robots are denied the perceived promise of humanity by their creators. Think of David in A.I., Ava in Ex Machina, the Replicants in Blade Runner, Andrew Martin in Bicentennial Man, (another) David in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, or Dolores Abernathy in Westworld. The list goes on.
Klara, the artificial human and protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro’s richly nuanced cozy dystopian novel Klara and the Sun, has no such ambition. In fact, she sees humans as inherently flawed—but in a nice way. To Klara, these are not moral failings but rather vulnerabilities she is driven to understand. Ishiguro has inverted the trope so perfectly that it’s the human characters who anthropomorphize the robot, some going so far as to hope that they can truly love her like a human. Klara is happy to oblige, but only to fulfill her programming. She has no ambition beyond service.
Although the robot is technically an “it,” almost every character in the novel refers to Klara as “she”—myself included. It’s hard not to. Klara is engineered to be attentive, observant, and gifted with infinite, tireless patience. She is self-reliant and solar-powered. She is always there, ready to listen and offer support; she is never irritable or snarky because her only desire is to be the perfect Artificial Friend. It is a compelling offer. Even Klara’s physical appearance is designed to be attractive: Josie, the sickly teenage girl who chooses Klara, is drawn to her because she looks “cute” and “French,” with her dark hair styled in a bob cut. I imagined Klara looking like a teenage version of Amélie. Jenna Ortega has been cast as Klara in the upcoming film adaptation directed by Taika Waititi.
It is the ELIZA effect—named after the 1966 chatbot created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. The characters can’t help themselves. Josie is careful not to hurt Klara’s feelings, and chides others if they show a lack of consideration for what Klara “wants.” Another character worries she might have offended the robot by comparing her to an appliance; still another defends Klara from a stranger’s hostility towards robots. Almost everyone—every human, that is—expresses genuine, constant concern over whether Klara is happy, worried, content, or sad.
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Yet, while Klara may be capable of mimicking all these emotions and more (hope, fear, empathy), she sees them simply as a means to an end. Klara’s entire focus is on observing the world to better understand human behavior, solely to fulfill her primary purpose: to be a good AF to Josie. All other considerations are secondary. She is even willing, at times, to sacrifice her own functionality to ensure Josie’s happiness.
It is difficult not to compare Klara’s selfless devotion to that of Mr. Stevens, the butler at Darlington Hall in Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day. But whereas Stevens is so tragically constrained by his duty that he sacrifices his own emotional well-being—specifically his chance for love with Miss Kenton and his final moments with his father—for the sake of his deeply flawed employer, Klara makes no such sacrifice. She prefers the clarity of her devotion. Because that is literally what she was made for.
The cleverness of Ishiguro’s writing is that when I first read Klara and the Sun, I thought it a tragedy similar to The Remains of the Day; I found the ending equally bleak. But reading it a second time, I realized that this bleakness is in me. It is simply another form of my anthropomorphism of Klara. Only a human would find the idea of Klara’s purpose inescapably futile—that a child will eventually grow up and the robot AF will no longer be needed. The robot couldn’t care less. There is no emotional sacrifice because Klara has literally no real emotions for herself. They are mathematical approximations of feelings she uses only to fulfill her purpose. Klara has no ego; she is anathema to Descartes. She can think, but she has no human soul—nor does she want one.
Unlike Ava in Ex Machina or Roy Batty in Blade Runner, Klara doesn’t crave “life” for herself. She cannot feel slighted or insulted, nor does she fear for her own well-being. And she is remarkably incapable of feeling anger. After witnessing a physical fight between two cab drivers, Klara attempts to learn from the experience (as she always does) by mimicking the rage in their faces. She fails, noting: “It was useless though, and I always end up laughing at my own thoughts.”
At first, I thought Klara’s inability to feel anger was Ishiguro’s nod to Asimov’s First Law of Robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” But as I read on, I realized this was just me experiencing another example of the ELIZA effect. I was projecting my human sense of self onto a sophisticated machine that possessed none.
Ishiguro had written Klara so adroitly that I cared for her well-being even though she does not care for her own. When Klara is compared to a vacuum cleaner, I felt awkward on her behalf, even though she felt nothing positive or negative. This point is driven home later in the book, when Klara is happy to spend her time in the Utility Room at Josie’s home until she’s needed. The Utility Room. The place for a washing machine and dryer. And a vacuum cleaner.
The idea of a Klara-like robot is supremely seductive. She exists purely to ensure your happiness; all other considerations are secondary. Yet, not everyone in Klara and the Sun is seduced by these machines. Far from it.
I use the phrase “cozy dystopian” to describe this novel because everything—apart from the robots—feels remarkably unremarkable. It is a velvet-gloved dystopia: it looks like home until you peer underneath the surface to see the darkness beneath. It is the recognizable facade of the New York and New England of today, but not quite.
There are the red barns and rolling landscapes of the countryside. There are the busy streets of Manhattan (though never named as such) populated by an archetypal range of city-dwellers going about their business, heads down in various to-dos, pressing their “oblongs” (Klara’s astute description of a smartphone). Construction workers toil behind barriers; diners serve pie, and restaurants offer sushi. But inside the apartments and Upstate homes, the atmosphere shifts. We see awkward, distracted teenagers trying to turn parasocial relationships into real ones, while their brittle parents obsess over what’s best for their children and worry about the future of their own careers.
Underneath all this familiarity lies the creeping ubiquity of AI and the slow, administrative violence of automation.
Two words of dialogue stopped me dead: “post-employed.” It’s not a term I remember coming across before, but it seems remarkably prescient. Ishiguro uses it to describe communities of people who haven’t just been made redundant; they have been rendered permanently obsolete. Of course, he doesn’t draw a direct correlation or offer a rationale. He merely hints at it; the phrase “post-employed” is only used twice in the entire book.
This is where I’d argue the novel stops being science fiction and becomes science amplification
Yet, the inescapable conclusion is that robots have decimated the human workforce. Like catching a glimpse of a passenger on a passing subway train, we read snippets of conversation about the “post-employed”—former workers, many of them white-collar, living in armed communities under threat of eviction. It is a latent image of social unrest. While I was reading this, a leaked report revealed that Amazon’s robotics team has a long-term goal of automating 75% of its operations, potentially displacing up to 1.7 million human jobs. The shift seems systemic. In a recent Financial Times post, Macquarie analyst Daisy Zhang forecast that annual humanoid robot sales will reach 50,000 units next year, rising to 1.1 million units annually by 2031. She further predicted that by 2034, the number of robots per 10,000 human factory workers would exceed the current density rate for industrial robots—a sector that already saw over half a million units installed globally last year.
Klara, the extraordinarily observant AF, processes this social decay merely as data. And why should she do otherwise? Klara is not here to take anyone’s job; she is simply a machine designed to be a best friend for a child who doesn’t have one.
This is where I’d argue the novel stops being science fiction and becomes science amplification. Ishiguro isn’t predicting a far-off future; he is extrapolating our present moment. 2025 is the year in which AI has become ubiquitous. We are already living in a time where children find it easier to have personal relationships with machines than with humans. We have seen the tragic consequences that it can lead to.
In Klara and the Sun, the tragedy isn’t that the machines are evil—they are amoral in the most literal sense of the word. It is that automation and connectivity have become so effective at filling the void of human loneliness that they have rendered actual human connection obsolete. Children have to attend “interaction meetings,” structured events where parents desperately try to socialize kids who no longer know how to do it themselves because they have spent their lives staring at their “oblongs.” The great irony is that the Artificial Friend is a technological cure for a problem caused by technology in the first place.
Back in 2016, when I was working at The Verge, we interviewed Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry known for her pioneering work on the gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9. Now, almost ten years later, Doudna’s work has yielded significant successes, and there is a promise of enormous benefits in the near future. However, gene editing—unlike AI—is still a nascent technology, at least in terms of mass adoption. And with good reason: The ethical dilemmas surrounding its use are very real, a point made eloquently by Doudna herself in a recent interview with Cleo Abram.
(Spoiler warning: From here on out, we’re going to allude to elements of the ending, so if you want to go into the book blind, stop here and read the entire novel before returning. Thank you.)
As with robotics and AI, Kazuo Ishiguro has taken the reality of gene editing today and extrapolated its future potential as a tool for economic segregation. Just as he uses “post-employed,” Ishiguro uses the word “lifting” to hint at this procedure—but never outright explains. It is often no more than a casual mention, usually framed by the negative consequences for those who aren’t lifted rather than the benefits for those who are. As with so much of the book, we rely entirely on Klara’s observational data—in this case, to deduce a character’s social status. Josie’s father is a post-employed engineer living in a segregated community; Josie’s mother has a successful career and, as Klara notes from her clothing, is “high-ranking,” moving in a prestigious circle where the vast majority of children are “lifted.”
This is the perfect storm of Ishiguro’s world: automation decimates the workforce from below, while genetic editing locks the gates of the elite from above. If you are not “lifted,” you cannot access the education required to avoid becoming “post-employed.” It is a closed loop of privilege that feels devastatingly familiar to our current trajectory of income inequality.
And stuck in the middle of this quiet, technological upheaval is Klara.
Throughout the novel, the humans grapple with the existential angst that they might be replaceable in every sense—that science has proven every aspect of the human condition can be replicated by a robot. As Mr. Capaldi, the AF designer, explains, there is nothing “unreachable” in a human. We are intrinsically finite; complex data that can be copied and transferred to a machine.
But Klara proves him wrong. She realizes that while she can mimic a human to absolute statistical perfection, she cannot replicate the love others feel for that human. Klara deduces that the “soul” of a person isn’t located inside themselves; it lives in the people who love them.
This realization leads us to the book’s conclusion, which is less about a dramatic climax and more about a gentle obsolescence; the “slow fade.”
In any other story, Klara and the Sun's ending would define it as a tragedy. I shouldn’t feel sad for a robot, but I do. After giving everything—her processing power, her total devotion, even her robot equivalent of blood—the definition of her success is her obsolescence. Yet Klara is not sad. As she spends time waiting for what comes next in her version of the Utility Room, quietly rearranging her memories, she is content in the knowledge that she completed her task. And she is grateful.
When she is visited in the final pages, she asks for nothing, just to remain where she is. She simply says, “Thank you for choosing me.”
I found it the most heartbreaking line in the book, precisely because it is not heartbreaking for Klara. It is the ultimate expression of the argument made by writer Ted Chiang: that we should replace the term “Artificial Intelligence”—which is ironically far too anthropomorphic—and call this revolutionary technology what it actually is: Applied Statistics.
Klara is just math with an exoskeleton and fabric for skin. She is an appliance that worked. She made Josie happy while she could, and then her work was done. As another famous robot, Andrew Martin in Bicentennial Man, once said: “One is glad to be of service.”
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