Lupine Publishers | Robots Among Us: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

 Lupine Publishers | Scholarly Journal Of Psychology And Behavioral Sciences

Introduction

Kazuo Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. The award citation said of him that “in his novels of great emotional force, he has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” [1]. Four years later, his most recent novel, Klara and the Sun [2] was published. It is not about any kind of abyss. It is about connections among us humans, and also with other kinds of being. Although its protagonist, Klara, is a robot, this novel is far more psychological than some of the papers that are published in psychology journals. As with solar panels, Klara is powered by the Sun, an entity that not only provides her with electrical energy to move and think, but comes to take on, for her, a god-like significance. What, then, is the difference between her and biologically based human beings?

Robots and Artificial Intelligence

As we think about robots, we generally consider them to be artificial, made from silicon. But this isn’t the only kind of robot. In The Robot’s Rebellion [3], Keith Stanovich has pointed out that we humans are also robots. The genes, which we tend to think of as “ours,” are not really ours at all. It is we who are their vehicles. Genes have programmed us to carry them along and nourish them, so that they can reproduce and proliferate. It’s not gods that are immortal, it’s these strands of DNA: the genes. So, as Stanovich proposes, we need to rebel, not just allow ourselves to be programmed by genes but, instead, to make our own human decisions. Ishiguro’s novel is about what kind of decisions we make for ourselves and others, and for what purposes. It prompts us towards thinking: what, or who, is a robot? What does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to understand someone fully, and to love them? Some people have wondered whether robots based in artificial intelligence (AI) will not just learn but will do so better than any other kind of being and, in this way, become more intelligent that humans, and perhaps take over the world. Looking back through history, with its wars and colonialism, thinking about income inequality and climate change, we may wonder how well we humans have done, in charge of the world: not nearly as well as we might have wished. But, with the coming of more effective forms of artificial intelligence, including “Deep Learning,” in which computational artificially intelligent systems do not need to be trained, but construct intuitions by taking in many examples from which they change their systems’ inter-neural connections [4], perhaps we might collaborate with them and learn, ourselves, to think more clearly. The physicist Stephen Hawking has said that “Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. It might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks” [5].

Perhaps this idea of artificial robots taking over the world is a Western view. Another view is, as Ishiguro suggests, that robots might be our friends. The emergency room physician, Brian Goldman, wrote a book called The Power of Kindness [6]. In one chapter he describes a visit he made to Japan, to investigate the making of robots who look after people who can’t look after themselves. With increased numbers of such people, as many of us become older, when diseases that used to kill us become chronic disabilities, more of us need to be cared for. These robots don’t just do physical tasks. The designers are striving to enable them to hold conversations in the way that people do, as Klara does in Ishiguro’s novel. Goldman said that he went to Japan in search of empathetic androids. What he found were kind people, working to produce kind robots. Might it be, perhaps, that this kind of influence from Japan, where Ishiguro lived until he was five years old, when he and his Japanese parents moved to Britain, became part of his idea of the novel about Klara: an AF: “Artificial Friend.” Here the question is not whether we humans might be annihilated by a form of artificial life, but what it is to be a friend, what it is to love someone. In the novel, the artificial friend, Klara is purchased by the mother of a teenager called Josie. The two of them live together, and after her morning cup of coffee, Mother (capital M in this novel) goes to work each day. And that is why, Josie needs someone to be her companion and friend. This someone is Klara. She looks like a human being. She is intelligent, perceptive of what occurs in the world, and very good at understanding people. A fascinating feature of this novel is its depiction of Klara’s thought patterns and observations. Klara comes to love Josie, as if from the inside, and would do anything for her. We see how the two of them get on extremely well together. We readers also form a close attachment with Klara, and, because of this, the last part of this novel is emotionally moving.

Gene Editing

At one of the novel’s turning points, Josie starts to become sick. Her physical condition deteriorates. The reason for this, perhaps, although readers are not told explicitly, is that she has been “lifted.” The term is first mentioned well into the novel, and it is never explained. What it seems to mean is that some children have, perhaps after their parents have paid a great deal of money, been genetically engineered to make them more intelligent than other children. The ones who have had this operation, are rather pleased with themselves and tend to look down on those who have not. It seems likely, however, that this piece of genetic engineering can make some of them vulnerable: liable to become sick, and even to die. As this starts to occur with Josie, Klara prays fervently to the Sun, and tries to think of ways to save Josie. Artificial intelligence has now been around for several decades. Genetic engineering is more recent. Alongside the issue of whether artificially intelligent robots might come to live on this planet, this newer question has occurred: might human children have their intelligence lifted? Could they have their abilities improved by means of genetic alterations? And would this be for everyone, or just for children of very wealthy parents? A pioneer of genetic engineering, also a winner of a Nobel Prize, in this case in 2020, for Chemistry, is Jennifer Daudna. Along with her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, she discovered “the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors. Using these, researchers can change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision” [7]. Animals include human beings. A biography of Daudna has been published this year, by Walter Isaacson: The Code Breaker: Jennifer Daudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race [8]. In Ishiguro’s novel, what is Josie’s Mother to do, as her daughter becomes more and more ill? She begins to have a physical model built of Josie. It looks exactly like her with working limbs and other parts. At the same time, Klara is tested to see whether, with her keen observational skills, she really knows Josie from the inside. She does. The idea, then, is that if Josie were to die, then the computational parts of Klara, which have come to know Josie, would be extracted and inserted into the working physical model of Josie’s body. What, or who, might emerge would be a completely new Josie, without illness, who would have her forebear’s style of movement and facial expressions, her thoughts, her words. In this way perhaps many people might not be able to tell the difference between the artificial Josie and the one who is likely to die. Many people? Including her Mother? Or would something necessarily be left out? If so, what might that be?Acknowledgement

 thank Alison Fleming for reading this review and making a thoughtful suggestion.

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Lupine Publishers | History, Historians and Anthropocene

 Lupine Publishers | Scholarly Journal Of Psychology And Behavioral Sciences

Introduction

Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself- Rachel Carson. The Anthropocene is a generally accepted framework for describing the planet we now live in. The Anthropocene is a crucial paradigm for addressing environmental challenges in scientific, political, and ethical arguments. Its major contribution is a scientific, and hence non-normative, the hypothesis of man-made global warming. The assumed connection of man and environment provides a systemic perspective.

Holocene or Anthropocene?

The Holocene epoch relates to the fast proliferation, expansion, and global effect of humans, encompassing all its recorded history, technological revolutions, the emergence of major civilizations, and the overall considerable change to urban existence in the present. Sir Charles Lyell seems to have proposed the word Holocene in 1833, and it was adopted by the International Geology Congress in Bologna in 1885, referring to the post-glacial geological age of the past 10 to 12 thousand years of history. The Anthropocene has surpassed the Holocene as the most recent geological period. Since the year 2000, the notion of the Anthropocene has dominated discussion in practically every academic subject [1-4], including the humanities and social sciences, and has evolved into an inter-and transdisciplinary study area. It has also dissolved long-standing humanities divisions that have affected this discipline, such as those between ‘nature’ and ‘history,’ and ‘geological’ and ‘human.’ Furthermore, when previous ideas of human purpose, temporality, and collective memory- all of which are vital to historical inquirydeteriorate, historians must create new and crucial frameworks connecting the past and present to make sense of our future. At the very least, the term ‘Anthropocene’ sounded academic, combining Anthropos, the Greek word for ‘human,’ with ‘cene,’ the suffix used in geological period names [5]. The Anthropocene is a term from the Holocene Era that refers to the current evolutionary stage in which humans have become a significant factor in world activities.

Histories of the Anthropocene

The study of history is based on the concept that human history has a particular consistency that connects our past, present, and future. In our usual creative universe, we typically envisage the future using the same conceptual framework that allows us to comprehend the past. History of climate is the study of historical variations in climate and their impact on civilization from the advent of hominins to the present. This contrasts with palaeoclimatology, which studies climate change throughout Earth’s history. These historical effects of climate change may either improve human existence and lead society to thrive, or they can play a role in civilization’s eventual demise. Scholars have been hesitant to formally identify the Anthropocene as a new epoch, despite a huge increase in research over the last two decades. The difficulty in determining the beginning point is likely the most powerful argument, but issues about the human being, anthropocentrism and the validity of metaphors have also prompted many scientists to question the classification’s efficiency [6]. The Anthropocene’s projected ages, on the other hand, range from 50 to 10,000 years. The word “Anthropocene” was invented by Eugene Stoermer in the early 1980s, but it only acquired general acceptance in the scientific world until Dutch atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen supported it in 2000. It occurs throughout the Holocene, a roughly 12,000-year period of growing natural stability during which varied human communities evolved.

The shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, unlike any previous geological shift, is driven by the purposeful behaviour of sentient creatures: ‘This is not merely an environmental disaster; it is a volcanic change induced by people.’ As a result, the notion of the Anthropocene implies that the history of human civilizations is inextricably linked to the history of the climate. History and geology are inextricably linked, posing a significant intellectual problem for the humanities. The Anthropocene hypothesis has become a solid, discussed phrase in the humanities and social sciences, bringing up new ways of thinking about humans, environmental communities, energy production, interactions with non-human life, confrontation, the social, and the presence of the past [7-9]. When academicians and other social scientists started studying globalization in the late 1980s and early 1990s, climate change became widely accepted in the public realm. While the Marxist critique of capital, subaltern studies, Indigenous science, and post-colonial criticism have all been enormously helpful in analysing globalization during the past twenty-five years, they have not fully equipped us to make sense of the ecological crisis in which humanity now finds itself. Joseph Needham, a physicist, and historian who had studied extensively in China, explored methods to break down boundaries and proposed a venture that highlighted all cultures’ reciprocal reliance.

The Anthropocene Controversy

We may make the case for the Anthropocene by stating that humans have depleted 40% of the world’s petroleum reserves during the previous few hundred years. This work has taken ages, if not millennia, to complete. Human activity has significantly altered approximately half of the Earth’s terrestrial area, generating biodiversity shifts [10,11], nutrient cycle, and soil, climatic, and environmental changes. Synthetic nitrogen fixation is currently fixing more nitrogen in terrestrial ecosystems than all-natural processes combined. People use half of all freshwaters, which is quickly dwindling in many areas. Some scientists think that the Anthropocene began in the late eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice indicated the beginning of increased global carbon dioxide and methane emissions. This day also happens to coincide with the creation of the steam engine. According to the WGA (Working Group on the Anthropocene), the Anthropocene Period began in 1950, because of nuclear testing, the discovery of plastics, and the exponential demographic rise of the human population. The Post-Anthropocene epoch is also known as the Plutocene epoch. Despite significant advances in the study over the previous century [5], we are still a long way from understanding nature. The Anthropocene debate is the peak of Nature/Society duality. And, though the Anthropocene is inadequate as a historical rather than geological assertion, it is always an argument worth considering. A sequence of early steps results in the emergence of new concepts. On the way to a new synthesis, there are various philosophical detours. Without a question, the Anthropocene definition is the most impactful of these compromises. No other theory based on historical transition has had such a broad influence throughout the Green Thought continuum; no other socioecological notion has piqued the public’s curiosity.

Anthropocene and Health

Go to

The fast expansion of the human population and human activities is producing a problem: the increasing pressure is disrupting important biophysical Earth systems and producing environmental changes that are detrimental and disastrous to human well-being. The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change report for 2019 shows how planetary health is evolving in the ecological, social, and human health realms.

Conclusion

If you assume that humans are the only species deserving of consideration, you have not comprehended Darwin’s revelation that we are but are no longer aware of our function in the environment. People’s ability to affect change at such a large scale and such a rapid pace were unparalleled. The rate at which these changes occur spans from decades to centuries, as opposed to hundreds to thousands of years for analogous transitions in Earth’s natural dynamics. The Anthropocene must be part of our lexicon if we acknowledge that not all men are equal contributors to our global ailments and that many are victims. We know who we are, what we do, and what our duties are as a community.

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