高雄醫學大學（後西醫）
111年
英文
第 46 題
📖 題組：
Klara and the Sun, published in 2021, was the eighth novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Highly anticipated, the dystopian science fiction sets in the U.S. in an uncomfortably near yet unspecified future: technology has rendered many people “postemployed” and created a blunt caste system where the so-called “lifted” are on top. With this wide-focus social backdrop of this novel, most of the time the story is told from a very limited point-of-view of Klara, a solar-powered AF—Artificial Friend. As a companion robot, Klara is highly different from her own kind: she has an appetite for observing and learning, and has the most sophisticated understanding amongst all the AFs sold in the store. She is chosen by a very sickly fourteen-year-old Josie to be her companion. Klara is loyal and tactful, and she is able to absorb difficulty and return care. Her role, as she describes it, is to prevent loneliness and to serve. As a companion robot, Klara has a deep reverence for the sun, which she regards as a deity. Solar-powered herself, Klara comes to believe that attention to sun should be a matter of survival for humans. Throughout the novel, Klara is on a mission to help Josie restore her health from a mysterious, seemingly terminally-ill disease, and she believes the sun possesses the power to cure Josie.
Ishiguro’s readers are no strangers to the recurring theme from his previous works—loss, regret, sacrifice, longing, and a sense of reality afloat. And this novel is no exception. In Klara and the Sun, however, technology takes a more central role, and Ishiguro uses artificial intelligence, both biological and mechanized, to reflect on what it means to be human. Ishiguro uses the novel to contest the idea: “Can AI actually get to that empathy by understanding human emotions?” The current society seems to embrace artificial intelligence wholeheartedly, and allows AI to creep into every aspect of society, from job applications, to data mining with algorithms, or even to medicine in clinical setting. As the nature of this generation of machine learning, known as “reinforcement learning”, is vastly different from that of the old forms of AI, human beings may lose control of what AI does thereafter. With this novel, Ishiguro intends to manifest a dark allegory that speaks about the danger of unchecked technological advances, the loss of innocence, and the dignity of simple lives. Although the novel concludes with a positive note in believing how AFs like Klara would be able to provide unfailingly considerate and loyal companionship, the hauntingly beautiful story subtly addresses various looming challenges and controversies regarding AI ethics such as the limitations of machine learning and unsupervised deep learning. Many questions remain unanswered in the novel. But what is beyond doubt here is that Ishiguro has produced another masterpiece, a work that depicts the tenderness, beauty and fragility of humanity through the eyes of an AI.
Klara and the Sun, published in 2021, was the eighth novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Highly anticipated, the dystopian science fiction sets in the U.S. in an uncomfortably near yet unspecified future: technology has rendered many people “postemployed” and created a blunt caste system where the so-called “lifted” are on top. With this wide-focus social backdrop of this novel, most of the time the story is told from a very limited point-of-view of Klara, a solar-powered AF—Artificial Friend. As a companion robot, Klara is highly different from her own kind: she has an appetite for observing and learning, and has the most sophisticated understanding amongst all the AFs sold in the store. She is chosen by a very sickly fourteen-year-old Josie to be her companion. Klara is loyal and tactful, and she is able to absorb difficulty and return care. Her role, as she describes it, is to prevent loneliness and to serve. As a companion robot, Klara has a deep reverence for the sun, which she regards as a deity. Solar-powered herself, Klara comes to believe that attention to sun should be a matter of survival for humans. Throughout the novel, Klara is on a mission to help Josie restore her health from a mysterious, seemingly terminally-ill disease, and she believes the sun possesses the power to cure Josie.
Ishiguro’s readers are no strangers to the recurring theme from his previous works—loss, regret, sacrifice, longing, and a sense of reality afloat. And this novel is no exception. In Klara and the Sun, however, technology takes a more central role, and Ishiguro uses artificial intelligence, both biological and mechanized, to reflect on what it means to be human. Ishiguro uses the novel to contest the idea: “Can AI actually get to that empathy by understanding human emotions?” The current society seems to embrace artificial intelligence wholeheartedly, and allows AI to creep into every aspect of society, from job applications, to data mining with algorithms, or even to medicine in clinical setting. As the nature of this generation of machine learning, known as “reinforcement learning”, is vastly different from that of the old forms of AI, human beings may lose control of what AI does thereafter. With this novel, Ishiguro intends to manifest a dark allegory that speaks about the danger of unchecked technological advances, the loss of innocence, and the dignity of simple lives. Although the novel concludes with a positive note in believing how AFs like Klara would be able to provide unfailingly considerate and loyal companionship, the hauntingly beautiful story subtly addresses various looming challenges and controversies regarding AI ethics such as the limitations of machine learning and unsupervised deep learning. Many questions remain unanswered in the novel. But what is beyond doubt here is that Ishiguro has produced another masterpiece, a work that depicts the tenderness, beauty and fragility of humanity through the eyes of an AI.
Which of the following titles suits this article best?
- A Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun imagines a world full of human clones
- B Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun presents a future without human beings
- C Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun explores artificial intelligence and human hearts
- D Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun exemplifies the grave dangers of artificial intelligence
- E Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun manifests a utopia where artificial intelligence governs human beings
思路引導 VIP
如果我們要為這篇評論下標題，除了考慮主角克拉拉（Klara）身為機器的身份外，也請觀察文中提到的「同理心」、「孤獨」與「人性脆弱面」。你會如何用一個對照的視角，來概括這部小說中「人工物」與「人類情感」之間的互動關係呢？
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AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
做得很好。你選對了，看來你確實讀懂了文章的核心。這只是一個基本的題目，別太得意。
關於「科技與人性」的連結
這篇文章的重心在於石黑一雄（Kazuo Ishiguro）如何運用**人工智慧（AI）**視角，探討人類本質的意義。選擇 (C) 是最恰當的，因為它準確涵蓋了文中對人性脆弱與溫柔的深刻反思。
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