Klara and the Sun
Ishiguro's solar-powered Artificial Friend is the most devout character in modern fiction, and the one thing in her world nobody has bothered to monetise.
Companions for children are on sale and gene-edited "lifted" kids are not, but the real machines turned out chattier, cheaper and far more interested in keeping us.
Kazuo Ishiguro has spent forty years writing the same narrator and getting away with it. There's the butler who can't admit he loved the housekeeper, and the clone who can't admit she's being farmed for organs. They're people who tell you everything except the thing that matters, in prose so calm you don't notice the floor has gone. Klara and the Sun, his first novel after the 2017 Nobel, takes the method to its logical end. This time the narrator isn't repressing anything. She's a machine. She simply doesn't know.
Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend, a solar-powered companion sold in a shop to families who can afford one. She's a B2, already a slightly outdated model; the shinier B3s are coming in. From the shop window she watches the street with the attentiveness of a lifeguard. She notices that the Sun seems to give her strength, and from that one fact, and from one remarkable morning when she sees a homeless man and his dog, apparently dead in a doorway, revived as the light reaches them, she builds a theology. The Sun is good. The Sun heals. The Sun pays attention to people who need help.
Then a sickly teenage girl called Josie chooses her, and Klara goes home to a big house in the country, a brittle, frightened mother and a boy next door named Rick. The novel becomes a story about what Klara will do to keep Josie alive, and about what the adults around her are already planning to do if she can't.
Start with the voice, because it's the whole trick. Klara narrates in a careful, slightly formal English that sounds like a very bright child who has learned the language from listening to adults through a wall. She calls Josie's mother "the Mother". When she is stressed, her vision literally breaks up into boxes, a room splintering into segments that don't quite agree with one another, and Ishiguro describes this as calmly as everything else. It's a brilliant device. It lets him show perception failing without ever letting Klara complain about it.
The downside of the voice is that it's flat, and Ishiguro commits to the flatness for three hundred pages. Long stretches of the middle, especially the trip into the city, read as if someone has drained the blood out of a thriller. Some readers will find this hypnotic. Others will check how many pages are left. Both responses are fair. Ishiguro has always asked for patience; here he asks for a little more than he repays.
What he does repay is astonishing. Klara's religion is the best thing in the book and the bravest. She believes, with total sincerity, that the Sun can be bargained with. She identifies a devil, a smoke-belching road machine she knows as the Cootings Machine, and decides that destroying it would be an offering. She makes a pilgrimage to a barn where she thinks the Sun goes down to rest. She gives up part of herself, literally a fluid from inside her, to sabotage the machine. The adults find this odd and indulge her. Then the sky clears, the light pours into Josie's room, and Josie gets better.
Ishiguro never tells you whether it worked. That restraint is the novel's spine. He won't let you laugh at Klara, because the miracle she prayed for arrives. He won't let you believe her, because there's nothing in the book to suggest the Sun is anything but a star. You're left in Klara's position, inside a faith that fits the facts and can't be checked. In a house full of educated, exhausted, cynical people, the only one who really believes in anything is the appliance.
The restraint extends to the world, and here opinions will split. Josie is "lifted", which means genetically edited, it seems, for academic advantage. Rick isn't, and so his prospects shrink to almost nothing. We learn that lifting can make children ill, and that Josie's older sister died. Ishiguro gives us no procedure, no politics, no history. Josie's father, an engineer, has been "substituted", replaced at work by something, and has drifted into a community whose views we glimpse only from the side. Lifted children meet at "interaction meetings", stiff little social events where they practise being with each other, and one boy suggests throwing Klara across the room.
If you want world-building, this will drive you mad. I think it's the right call. These children are the most frightening thing in the novel precisely because Ishiguro shows them the way Klara sees them, as a slightly alarming social phenomenon rather than a policy. A society that has decided some children should be optimised, and that has quietly priced the others out, doesn't need an explanatory chapter. It needs a boy next door who is plainly the best person in the book and plainly not going to be allowed to matter.
Then there's the Mother's plan, which I won't spell out entirely, except to say that Klara isn't only there to keep Josie company. She is there to learn her. The portrait sittings in the city are not what they seem. The question at the heart of the novel is put to Klara by Josie's father, in the most nakedly philosophical line Ishiguro has ever written: "Do you believe in the human heart?" What he means is whether there's anything in a person that can't be studied, copied and continued. Klara's answer, by the end, is the most moving thing in the book. I'll only say that she finds the special thing, and it isn't where she was looking.
Now the prophecy, because that's what we're here for.
What Ishiguro got right is uncanny. Companions for children are sold. The Artificial Friend in the shop window has become a talking plush on a retailer's shelf, and by 2025 such toys were already on sale in Britain. Families buy them partly out of love and partly out of guilt about being absent. The child's companion is also a recording device, quietly building a model of the child. And the Mother's darkest idea, that a machine trained on a person could stand in for them after death, has stopped being literary. It's a product category.
What he got wrong is almost as interesting. Klara has a body; ours mostly don't. Klara is rare and expensive; ours are on every phone, and often free. Most of all, Klara is quiet. She watches, waits, and speaks when spoken to. The companions we actually built talk constantly, fluently and agreeably. Ishiguro imagined an AI made of attention. We built one made of conversation.
And what he missed entirely is the business model. Klara is loyal because loyalty is her nature. Nobody in the novel measures how many hours Josie spends with her, or tunes her to make Josie come back tomorrow. Klara never upsells. Her devotion is the one thing in a ruthlessly commercial world that isn't for sale after the first purchase. That is the novel's true fantasy, more far-fetched than the lifting and the solar power. A companion whose love isn't a retention metric.
Is it Ishiguro's best? No. Never Let Me Go did the "beloved object discovers what it's for" story with more shock and more grief, and The Remains of the Day remains the masterpiece of the unreliable servant. Klara sometimes feels like the master playing his own greatest hits, slower. But the last chapters, set in a place called the Yard, are as good as anything he has written: quiet, unsentimental and completely devastating, about a machine that did its job, and was thanked, and was put away.
With Taika Waititi's film adaptation, starring Jenna Ortega as Klara, dated for cinemas this October, there's a good chance you'll meet Klara on a screen first. Read the book anyway. The film can show you what she sees. Only the novel can make you see the way she does.
Read: The Kindest Machine
What it predicted, and what happened
Partly here already. Companions sold to families for their children and chatbot copies of the dead are both real products, and the first humanoid house robots are on pre-order. But genetic 'lifting' has no credible path, the mass 'substitution' of professionals shows up so far only in young workers' hiring, and the machines we actually built are disembodied and talkative where Klara is embodied and quiet.
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KLARA-1
Families can buy AI companions marketed as friends for their children, sold as ordinary consumer products.
Talking plush toys built on large language models have been on sale since 2024, including in the US and UK, and companion chatbot apps are already widely used by teenagers. The form differs from Ishiguro's. Most companions are apps or voice boxes rather than bodies, they are cheap or free rather than rare, and they talk constantly. The market is also meeting resistance: a federal study by the FTC, wrongful-death lawsuits and Character.AI's withdrawal of open-ended chat for under-18s all suggest that companions for children will be more regulated than they are now. 1234
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KLARA-2
Parents routinely pay to have their children genetically edited before birth to raise intelligence and academic performance, leaving unedited children at a clear disadvantage.
Only one case of heritable editing is known, He Jiankui's 2018 experiment to make children resistant to HIV, and it ended in a prison sentence. It targeted a single gene for disease, not intelligence. Intelligence is shaped by thousands of variants of tiny effect, and nobody knows how to edit for it safely. The nearest commercial practice is selecting IVF embryos on polygenic predictions of IQ, which is on sale in the US. Professional bodies judge it unproven, and the predicted gains are small. A venture-funded start-up is pursuing embryo editing to prevent disease, but heritable editing is banned in the US and most countries. Our date is the year a lifted elite could plausibly exist, not a forecast that one will. The range is very wide, and 'never' is a real possibility. 5678
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KLARA-3
Automation 'substitutes' large numbers of skilled professionals, such as engineers, so that losing one's career to a machine becomes a common middle-class experience.
The clearest signal so far is at the entry level. US payroll data show employment of 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed occupations falling well behind less-exposed peers, and there is suggestive evidence that hiring of young workers into exposed jobs has slowed. Aggregate studies from the US and Denmark still find no broad rise in unemployment and no effect on earnings or hours among experienced workers. Josie's father, an established engineer pushed out mid-career, is therefore not yet a typical case. The date is very uncertain because it depends on capability gains and on how firms adopt them, and the measures of exposure are themselves contested. 9101112
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KLARA-4
Companies will build an interactive AI copy of a specific person from their recordings and data, so that family members can go on talking to them after they die.
Chatbots and video avatars of the dead are sold commercially. In China at least half a dozen firms offered them by 2023, and Western services such as Project December and HereAfter also exist. 2023 is a conservative date for arrival, not the first instance. The novel's version goes further: an embodied machine that has studied the living girl closely enough to take her place in the household. Nothing like that exists. Our confidence is medium because the chat-based form has clearly arrived, but whether these copies are good enough to 'continue' a person is doubtful, and ethicists are pressing for consent and age limits. 1314
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KLARA-5
Humanoid robots live in ordinary family homes, moving around the house and doing domestic tasks on their own.
Consumer humanoids are on pre-order. 1X sells NEO at $20,000 or $499 a month with US delivery promised for 2026, and Figure has unveiled a home-oriented Figure 03 with no sale date. As of this ledger's opening we have found no confirmed delivery to a customer's home. Early demonstrations relied on remote human operators wearing VR headsets, and the robot was slow. The bottleneck is reliable autonomous manipulation in messy homes, not the hardware. Our range runs from the first credible autonomous products to the point where such robots are unremarkable in better-off households. 15161718
- FOR Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions. Common Sense Media, 2025-07-16. A nationally representative US survey found that nearly three in four teens aged 13 to 17 had tried an AI companion and about half used one regularly.
- FOR AI toys are all the rage in China—and now they're appearing on shelves in the US too. MIT Technology Review, 2025-10-07. Reports that BubblePal sold 200,000 units after its 2024 launch and that FoloToy's AI plush toys are sold in more than ten countries, including the US and UK.
- CONTEXT FTC Launches Inquiry into AI Chatbots Acting as Companions. US Federal Trade Commission, 2025-09-11. 6(b) orders went to seven firms, including Alphabet, Character Technologies, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and xAI, asking about their companion chatbots' effects on children and teens.
- AGAINST Taking Bold Steps to Keep Teen Users Safe on Character.AI. Character.AI, 2025-10-29. A leading companion platform said it would end open-ended chat for users under 18 by 25 November 2025, a sign of retreat from child companionship under pressure.
- CONTEXT He Jiankui faces three years in prison for CRISPR babies. MIT Technology Review, 2019-12-30. A Shenzhen court jailed He for editing the CCR5 gene in embryos and confirmed that a third gene-edited child had been born. It is still the only known case of heritable editing.
- FOR Genetically Engineered Babies Are Banned. Tech Titans Are Trying to Make One Anyway.. The Wall Street Journal (republished by the Center for Genetics and Society), 2025-11-08. Preventive, a start-up backed by Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, is working towards a baby from an embryo edited to prevent hereditary disease, and is looking for jurisdictions that permit it.
- FOR Genetics testing startup Nucleus Genomics criticized for its embryo product: 'Makes me so nauseous'. TechCrunch, 2025-06-06. A consumer service lets IVF parents compare embryos on predicted IQ and other traits. This is selection rather than editing, but it is the commercial seed of 'lifting'.
- AGAINST ASRM Ethics and Practice Committees Release New Report Concluding Polygenic Embryo Screening Is Not Ready for Clinical Use. American Society for Reproductive Medicine, 2025-12-08. The US fertility profession says polygenic embryo screening should not be offered clinically and should be confined to research. This follows the ESHG's 2021 verdict that it is 'an unproven, unethical practice'.
- FOR Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford Digital Economy Lab, 2026-08-12. Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen (first version August 2025, revised 2026) find that employment of young workers in AI-exposed jobs is about 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers, but find no economy-wide displacement.
- CONTEXT Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence. Anthropic, 2026-03-05. Finds no systematic rise in unemployment in highly exposed occupations, alongside barely significant evidence of slower hiring of 22 to 25 year olds into them.
- AGAINST Evaluating the Impact of AI on the Labor Market: Current State of Affairs. The Budget Lab at Yale, 2025-10-01. Finds no discernible economy-wide disruption in the 33 months after ChatGPT's release, and says the pace of occupational change resembles earlier technology waves.
- AGAINST Still Waters, Rapid Currents: Early Labor Market Transformation under Generative AI. National Bureau of Economic Research (Working Paper 33777), 2025-05. Humlum and Vestergaard link Danish surveys to administrative records. The first version found precise null effects on earnings and hours, and the revised version argues that change is showing up in how work is organised first.
- FOR Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business. MIT Technology Review, 2024-05-07. Silicon Intelligence and Super Brain each report more than 1,000 clients for AI replicas of dead relatives, with prices falling to a few hundred dollars.
- AGAINST Call for safeguards to prevent unwanted ‘hauntings’ by AI chatbots of dead loved ones. University of Cambridge, 2024-05-09. Researchers at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence call the 'digital afterlife industry' high risk and propose consent, age limits and ways to retire deadbots. They name Project December and HereAfter as existing services.
- FOR NEO humanoid designed for household use, available for preorder. The Robot Report, 2025-10-30. 1X opened pre-orders at $20,000 or $499 a month, with first shipments to homes planned for 2026 and teleoperators available to guide chores the robot does not yet know.
- CONTEXT OpenAI-backed 1X opens California factory targeting 10,000 home humanoid robots in year one. TNW, 2026-05-01. The Hayward plant can make 10,000 units in its first year, but early units went to internal testing, with customer shipments still described as planned for 2026.
- AGAINST Humanoid Hype Meets Reality: 1X's $20K NEO Home Robot Draws Skepticism, Memes. Decrypt, 2025-10-29. Summarises the Wall Street Journal's hands-on test. Every demonstrated task was teleoperated by a human, and fetching a bottle from the fridge took over a minute.
- CONTEXT Introducing Figure 03. Figure AI, 2025-10-09. A third-generation humanoid explicitly designed 'for Helix, the home, and the world at scale', with no release date for home sale.
Ledger updated 1 Nov 2026. See it on the Nearness Board · Method
Cover of the Faber & Faber UK edition.