A Goodreads user asked this question about Klara and the Sun:
What is the Cooting's machine? It must have an actual purpose?
Iain Wright I see the Cooting's machine as an allegory for 'the devil' in keeping with the theme of Klara's worship of the sun. It may be less important that it's…moreI see the Cooting's machine as an allegory for 'the devil' in keeping with the theme of Klara's worship of the sun. It may be less important that it's probably just road resurfacing equipment. In such a dystopia where we have the power to tinker with the building blocks of our humanity with little regard to any adverse outcome, we will probably still attribute the crimes of humanity to our deities as we do now instead of realizing we are the problem. Klara mimics human frailty in this regard as she is programmed by it and she too attributes these problems to deities rather than humanity. To her, the machine is the opposing deity like 'the devil'. In her case, she has an excuse to be misguided; she has been programmed to protect and serve, not judge. (woe betide us when AI does have this ability). Throughout human history we have attributed good and bad to our deities in multiple forms across our cultures while almost ignoring the most obvious, most powerful yet fragile existential force ; mother nature - and its most likely threat - us. In an age of science, this becomes a decoy, a distraction from our responsibility as the architects of our own environmental and genetic destruction. Think of this next time you hear someone thanking their deity for sparing them from 'an act of god' such as a hurricane or blaming a little red man for our evils while attributing much less regard to 'mother nature' which will indeed be our final arbiter.(less)
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Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro (Goodreads Author)
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