We Read a Book About an "Artificial Friend" and Discuss AI

 Linda liked Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro better after the first half.

Carla – Why was Klara chosen? 

Marcia et al – Because Josie had a lot of illness, her parents were afraid she would die and wanted Klara to replace her with a simulacrum if she did die.

Ken liked the reader being Klara on the audiobook.

Linda liked that Klara was objective and not very emotional. Linda noted that Klara was learning about emotions and wasn’t snippy about it.

Ken – Klara personified the sun! Why – ?

Marcia – Because Klara was battery-operated. (She probably had a solar-powered battery.) Maybe by being around humans , she wanted to be more like humans.

Carla & Claudia –The Sun was source of life.

Ken – Are all people humans, and are all humans people? Is a pet cat a human? They are missed like a person when gone.

Carla/Linda – Are they humanity?

Linda – Put a lot of love into a toy doll, you get love from it.

The Klara Robot would become Josie if Josie died.  Carla – would the robot become more and more like Josie?

Klara preserved Josie’s role and was learning more and more.

Carla – Klara was becoming more human but took everything at face value.

Marcia – She was living in the “here and now.”

Carla – No one has to pay an AI the way you’d pay a person who does those activities.

Ken - Artificial Intelligence is not real.

Carla – Transferring money with a bot.  The transfer might not be completed because the robot isn’t doing the work.

Marcia – Asking an AI if It’s human – it laughed (wasn’t an AI)

Kootings machine – Lydia – it was supposed to pollute and also save Josie

Hard to understand exactly what the Kootings machine was all about.

Marcia – Programming a baby; problem is that bad people can make a type of kid (who might be bad for society).

Ken - Someone could create a Nazi type.

Marcia – “Lifted” kids could get grave illnesses.

Ken – If a child was not lifted, they were not likely to be able to get into good schools.

Linda – In the story, the current generation of parents were able to have their kids lifted so they would have a higher IQ.

AI would take over everything.

There would be the poor and the rich and that’s it.

Ken – People in the story tended to think there was something special inside, but it was not really in Josie but among those who loved her.

Carla – Klara replacing Josie would not have worked, because it was the love in others for Josie that was important.

Ken – Does/will AI enhance our relationships or not?

Carla – At the end of the story, someone wanted to take Klara apart and examine her black box. Robots are replacing people.

At the end of the story, Klara was sitting and just remembering, in a junkyard.

Linda – Old phones & iPads might have private information on them, (e.g., passwords), that someone could find.

Linda – What happens when lifted kids grow up and know their parents are not as smart as them?  If unlifted children are treated with scorn, why aren’t their parents and old people treated that way?

Carla – Workers are being hired, and then they quit. They just can’t handle the work. There are people out there who would like to work but can’t get jobs.

Linda – Some businesses don’t want to hire graduates from Ivy League colleges, because those students tend to act like they are "entitled."

Cindy’s daughter went to an Ivy League college and works hard.

Claudia went to an Ivy League college and worked hard at jobs.

Marcia – AOL means you’re old. Two spaces between sentences means you’re old, so AI will screen you out of the competition for some jobs.

Linda – You can buy a refrigerator that generates a shopping list.

Cindy – AI helps figure out to avoid having to do pesky little tasks.

Ken – A downside is that it’s using a mix of what was rather than what will be…like Stepford wives!

Marcia – Robots can look like dogs and can shoot you…drones!

Lydia – Many elderly people in Japan have robot dogs to play with and to cheer them up.

Joyce emailed a comment about the book: “I enjoyed the book very much and thought that it was incredibly timely with the current discussion of AI.”

The Aged Dragon in the Underground Lair

Although The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro, wasn’t everybody’s favorite read, it generated discussion. The book comprised a number of themes: we discussed memory, forgiveness, revenge, quests, aging and death.

Sometimes the themes were joined together, as when the Mist brought forgetfulness; and thoughts, promises, and plans regarding revenge were forgotten. Then, when we knew the Mist was going to be lifted, we realized that those who had sought revenge had been angered by people who were young, and now those same people were old; so the motive for revenge had lost power over time. Axl was an old man during the story, but he had been a young Roman warrior named Axelus or Axelum when Gawain was also young.  In the story, Gawain had been planning revenge for something Axl had done but let it go. As one of my friends once said, “Age is a great equalizer.”

The memory theme was poignant in the book, as the mist-caused forgetfulness was poignant. At first, it seemed that the elderly couple was suffering age-related memory loss, but then it became evident that the forgetfulness was caused by the dragon. Some of the correlated concepts that were thought-provoking were that forgetfulness helped the old couple to forget the grief that they had over their son’s death that had occurred during the plague; in the story, they were pursuing a journey to visit their son. The forgetfulness was also considered to have brought peace to the civilization by eliminating hate and revenge. Old wounds healed and relationships were saved because negative thoughts and feelings and grudges were forgotten. The author actively illustrated this forgetting by showing how it occurred between the elderly couple, Beatrice and Axl.

The boatman and the island he rowed people to were obvious symbols of the final journey of death. Early in the book an elderly, almost mythical witchlike woman told a tale of the boatman telling her that some couples were enabled to go to the island together but most were not; legend said people on the island wandered around alone and lonely, unable to find each other. At the end of the story, our discussion group worked hard to interpret the words the author used to describe the old couple, Beatrice and Axl, as they encountered the boatman. Beatrice was clearly ready to stay in the boat and go to the island. The boatman told Axl there was not room for him, but that the boat would return for him. Axl was then ignoring the boat and boatman and walking on his own. We had a little trouble being sure of what was happening and which direction Axl was headed, but the general consensus was that Beatrice was being carried to the island and Axl was walking toward it, both on their separate ways to death.

The Buried Giant was an excellent Book Discussion book!

Never Let Me Go opening today

The film version of Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go, is opening today. It stars Carey Mulligan as (adult) Kathy, Keira Knightly as (adult) Ruth, and Andrew Garfield as (adult) Tommy. Apparently the film is a little more revealing than the book was, probably to its detriment. As I recall, not everyone enjoyed the book (though I did), so maybe you might like the movie better.

Never Let Me Go - Who Wrote the Title?

If the author wrote the title for Never Let Me Go, there is a possibility that he meant for the main meaning of the book to involve the idea that Madam expresses toward the end of the book, that a new scientific order is encroaching on our humanity. If the editor wrote the title, it was probably to emphasize the reader's feeling a bit sorry for the children in the book, who grow up with no hope of much of a life. Our book discussion last week covered these ideas and many more!

On polling, approximately half of the members present "liked" the book. Criticisms included an inability to care about any of the characters and a dull, plodding story. Praise included a page-turner that unfolded with lots of surprises.

We had what I considered to be an interesting difference in interpretation, which showed how insightful our book discussions are. Dennis thought that the kids in the book were clones of probably wealthy people who had paid money and would use the clones' organs for themselves as needed. I disagreed, citing the adventure the kids in the book had when they went to look for Ruth's "similar," and there was discussion among them about their probably being clones of people who were failing in society. Someone else (sorry, I didn't remember who) suggested that the discussion among the kids in the book might have indicated their interpretation but that the author could have been implying that the kids were wrong. Then Pam piped up with a suggestion that we may have been analyzing the book in more detail than the author did!

We have great discussions, don't we! We discuss books that a lot of us don't like, but I think everyone occasionally is very pleasantly surprised by how much they do like or gain from one of our choices. And I also think that sometimes there are some changes of opinion after the discussion as to the likability of a book.