Kazuo Ishiguro: “I prefer not to write anything more than just another book.”

Clara is a machine with feelings. AA, an artificial friend who specializes in caring for children. From a shop window, he contemplates the world and never stops wondering what is going on in the heads of passers-by. Know your feelings and their ideals, you need solar energy to charge it. She is the heroine of “Clara and the Sun” (Anagrama), the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (Nagasaki, 66) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, as he investigates this tale of the essence of being human in a time of “big data”, genetic manipulation and the dilution of ideologies.

Throughout this science fiction story for children, Ishiguro addresses acute problems at a time of decisive change for humanity. He believes that “big data” will “change our view of the soul” and will force us to ask ourselves “if there is something beyond what technology can determine.” Clara, a kind of electronic pet, wonders what makes humans differentAnd I think the difference lies in our ability to love and care for each other, which makes us unique and indispensable, ”Ishiguro said from his home in the UK in a virtual interview with Spanish-speaking journalists.“ I don’t know if robots will become Emotional like human beings. “

The challenges of genetics are another theme in this novel in which Ishiguro wonders how we will get closer to creating physically and intellectually improved human beings through gene editing, “an increasingly easy, disorganized technique.” «How do we avoid giving birth to babies intellectually, physically, or who are not sick?He asks. He replied, “There will be some kind of brutal meritocracy and it will be dangerous if there are people who are better than others.”

It is believed that AI will eliminate many of today’s jobs and change the economic and political paradigm. “This will eliminate most of the jobs that are today considered part of the intellectual elite,” predicts Ishiguro, who is fiercely critical of tech empires such as Facebook or Google. “Technological businesses do not favor the well-being of people and we have to find a way to control them in order to obtain benefits,” he says. Far from making our lives easier, he believes that it “breeds inequality.” Facebook takes most of the ads pie while watching and trading with content. The formula must be found to align the interests of society and technology. We need to wake up to organize ourselves and remove the enormous risks that technology brings.

It is also concerned that digital monopoly and artificial intelligence “threaten liberal democracies, which have a harder time competing with authoritarian societies, with very strong alternative models of democracy, such as China and Russia, that can make effective economic decisions and have monitoring systems in place. . “Analyzing left and right is no longer sufficient,” he says.

But he maintains that Clara and the Sun is not a “dark or sad” book. This limits itself to showing a society that is changing. “I am not a pessimist, but I have no solutions other than an invitation to think about what is happening and note the big challenges in the face of scientific and technological changes,” he says. He admits that the years have made him “more optimistic about human nature.” “I want to celebrate the well-being of humankind because there is something wonderful that arises when you want to protect others in a cruel and hostile world in which you have to find ways of love, decency, kindness and hope.”

Slow

The British writer of Japanese descent is more than just a bonus. He began writing in 1982 and states that this is “only” his eighth novel. “I don’t write every day and never set myself goals. I talk, debate, think and meditate a lot before I start writing. I chase ideas and it takes a long time before I start writing them down. I prefer not to write anything more than any other book.”

Not to repeat himself is another goal of this extremely slow narrator whose role model is Stanley Kubrick in the cinema and Bob Dylan in music, who has always strived to do different things. “Dylan changed every record and Kubrick changed every movie. I suggest that I do the same thing and this gives me energy with every book, reflecting an era, ”he says.“ Literature is a mirror of what I feel at all times and where society is headed. It works on the exchange of feelings and ideas, ”says the author of“ What remains From today “(Booker Prize) or“ Things That Can’t Be Solved ”(Cheltenham Prize).

He asserts that Noble was not a burden to finish this novel. “I had written a third part when I got the award and it didn’t affect me.” Joking with the “superpowers” ​​that should have given him the award, said, “It was really a powerful project.” When I got back from Stockholm, I thought everything would work out perfectly, but Nothing has changed. All writing problems were present and were the same. It was as if a Nobel was awarded to me on another planet. “