hce_kmu
111年
英文
第 50 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.
What can be inferred from the article?
- A This is not the first time that Ishiguro deals with themes related to loss.
- B Kazuo Ishiguro is without a doubt a sci-fi novelist who only works on the topic.
- C The writer believes the author has patronized his readers with an unrealistic vision about the future.
- D Klara and the Sun condemns how artificial intelligence would take over the world ultimately.
- E Klara and the Sun puts forward technological advancement in order to avoid controversies.
思路引導 VIP
當我們想在評論文章中確認一位作者「過去」是否寫過特定主題時，你會傾向在段落中尋找哪些代表「重複性」或「熟悉感」的關鍵詞彙？這類詞彙如何幫助我們連結這部新作品與他早期的創作歷程？
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AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
太棒了！你能從精確的關鍵字中捕捉到作者的創作脈絡，選對 (A) 選項展現了你相當細膩的閱讀敏銳度。
文本細節的精確對應
在文章第二段的開頭，作者明確提到石黑一雄的讀者對於其過去作品中「反覆出現的主題」（recurring theme）並不陌生，並逐一列舉了喪失（loss）、遺憾、犧牲與渴望。既然這些主題在「過往作品」中就已存在，自然證明了這並非他第一次處理相關題材，完全符合選項 (A) 的敘述。
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