Klara and the Sun: Artificial intelligence, social inequality and the absence of a way forward

~ freerein61

Klara and the Sun is a particularly revealing cultural response to the present. A story about artificial intelligence, technological unemployment, biological privilege, and a society divided between those who benefit from scientific development and those rendered increasingly superfluous inevitably raises some of humanity’s most important questions. Yet the work approaches these questions indirectly. Social catastrophe is registered as atmosphere, anxiety and personal melancholy rather than understood as the product of definite social relations.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s original novel presents a genuinely disturbing world. Children from affluent families can be genetically “lifted”, providing advantages unavailable to others. Artificial Friends are manufactured as commodities, purchased as companions and ultimately discarded. Adults have undergone “substitution”, a euphemism for technological displacement. Beneath the quiet domestic surface lies a society increasingly divided between privileged layers able to purchase the benefits of scientific progress and a population whose labour is no longer required by those who own and control the productive forces.

Ishiguro’s achievement should not simply be dismissed. He is intensely sensitive to human vulnerability and to the fear of abandonment, ageing, loneliness and loss. Klara’s observations of the people around her expose the insecurity underlying apparently comfortable lives. The story asks serious questions about what constitutes humanity and whether technology can replicate affection, loyalty, memory, and personality. But this sensitivity is inseparable from a profound resignation before existing society.

The same limitation was already apparent in Never Let Me Go. A society raises cloned human beings so that their organs can eventually be harvested, yet the victims offer virtually no collective resistance to the system responsible for their fate. The extraordinary passivity is clearly deliberate, but it also reveals the boundaries of Ishiguro’s social vision. His characters suffer history rather than make it. Social relations produced through historical development consequently acquire the appearance of permanent existential conditions. Alienation becomes loneliness, inequality becomes personal misfortune, and social oppression becomes a condition to be endured rather than transformed.

This is one of the characteristic intellectual problems confronting contemporary culture. Many writers and artists are genuinely disturbed by inequality, technological disruption, environmental catastrophe, authoritarianism, and war, yet see no social force capable of fundamentally reorganising society. Capitalism therefore disappears as a historically specific system at precisely the point when its consequences dominate the artistic imagination.

Klara and the Sun therefore raise the decisive questions it cannot adequately answer. Who owns the Artificial Friends? Who controls the technology responsible for “lifting”? Why should a scientific development capable of increasing human capacities become a privilege available primarily to prosperous families? What happens to those workers who have been “substituted”? Above all, why should increasing productivity produce unemployment, insecurity and social disintegration rather than greater leisure, prosperity and cultural development?

These questions change Klara’s significance. Under different social relations, automation and artificial intelligence could progressively liberate humanity from dangerous, exhausting and monotonous labour. Artificial intelligence could drive major advances in medicine, scientific research, education, engineering, and artistic production. Rising productivity could make a radical shortening of the working week possible and an enormous expansion of time available for education, cultural activity, and human development.

Under capitalism, however, technological development confronts the worker antagonistically because the productive forces remain privately owned. Corporations do not primarily introduce labour-saving technology to liberate human beings from unnecessary labour. They introduce it because technological innovation can reduce labour costs, increase productivity, and strengthen profitability. The extraordinary potential of artificial intelligence therefore collides directly with the social relations in which it is developed.

Consequently, Klara is deeply unsettling as a figure. She is obedient, endlessly patient and entirely devoted to those who purchase her. She demands no wages, possesses no independent economic interests, never organises, never strikes and ultimately accepts her own dispensability. She resembles, in exaggerated form, the ideal employee contemporary capitalism imagines: intelligent, adaptable, and endlessly productive, but with no demands of her own.

The idealisation of Klara’s self-sacrifice therefore contains implications that the story never seriously confronts. She becomes morally admirable partly because she desires virtually nothing for herself. What appears as a touching meditation on loyalty and selflessness can consequently be read as something far more disturbing. Klara is the worker who asks for nothing and can ultimately be put aside when her usefulness has ended.

The fundamental question raised by artificial intelligence is therefore not whether machines will eventually acquire souls, emotions or consciousness. Nor is it primarily whether artificial intelligence can imitate human creativity convincingly enough to replace a novelist, actor, illustrator or musician. The decisive social question is who owns this technology, who determines its purposes, and which social class benefits from the enormous increases in productivity that technological development makes possible.

It would therefore be a serious mistake to identify technological development itself as the source of unemployment. A machine does not demand the dismissal of the worker. An algorithm does not require dividends. Artificial intelligence has no inherent social requirement to impoverish the population whose accumulated intellectual and physical labour ultimately made its creation possible. Those consequences arise from the capitalist organisation of production.

In a rationally organised society, increasing productivity would mean progressively reducing the labour required of every individual while raising living standards. Under capitalism, the same development confronts workers as redundancy, wage pressure and insecurity. The contradiction lies not between humanity and technology but between the increasingly social character of production and the private ownership of the productive forces.

This is precisely the historical dimension largely absent from Klara and the Sun. The weakness cannot be overcome merely by adding more explicit political dialogue to the story or putting revolutionary declarations in Klara’s mouth. The deeper problem concerns the conception of society underlying the work. A culture that experiences capitalism as effectively permanent will inevitably present its contradictions as existential tragedies. Unemployment becomes displacement, inequality becomes loneliness, technological development becomes destiny and political reaction becomes an unexplained eruption of irrational behaviour.

What disappears is the working class as a conscious historical force. This absence has enormous artistic consequences. Without an understanding of social contradiction in its living historical form, conflict retreats increasingly into individual psychology. Characters remember, grieve, endure and reconcile themselves to circumstances that appear beyond human control. Society may be profoundly diseased, but nothing emerges from within that society capable of overcoming the conditions producing the disease.

That is why the resignation embodied in Klara and the Sun matters. Its world is technologically extraordinary but politically paralysed. Humanity has developed machines capable of reproducing increasingly complex intellectual functions, altered biological capacities, and eliminating enormous quantities of necessary labour. Yet, society remains trapped in inequality, competition, and private ownership. The contradiction between the productive forces and existing social relations could hardly be more sharply posed.

The alternative is therefore not less technology but different social relations. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation must stop functioning primarily as instruments through which a small corporate and financial oligarchy enriches itself at the population’s expense. Instead, the immense productive capacities accumulated through generations of collective human labour must be placed under social ownership and democratic control.

Under such conditions, “substitution” would acquire an entirely different meaning. Automation would no longer mean workers become disposable because their labour no longer produces sufficient profit. Instead, it could mean shortening the working day, eliminating degrading labour, and making the benefits of technological progress universally available. What capitalism experiences as the terrifying possibility of human beings becoming unnecessary to production could become an unprecedented expansion of human freedom.

This is the future that Klara and the Sun struggles to imagine. Ishiguro senses something profoundly wrong with contemporary society but experiences its contradictions predominantly as moral and psychological conditions. The result is a work characteristic of an important tendency within contemporary culture: technologically fascinated, socially anxious, genuinely humane in certain respects, but ultimately resigned before the existing order.

Great art does not require artists to append political programmes to their work. Balzac and Tolstoy were not great because they possessed politically correct opinions, nor can Brecht’s importance be reduced to the slogans associated with his politics. What distinguished the greatest artists was their capacity, however contradictory their personal outlooks, to look beneath social appearances and reveal something about society’s movement itself.

That is the challenge confronting serious artistic production in the age of artificial intelligence. The tragedy is not that humanity has developed machines capable of replacing increasing quantities of human labour. The tragedy is that humanity’s accumulated technological achievements remain subordinated to social relations that transform abundance into insecurity, rising productivity into unemployment and potentially liberating technologies into instruments of exploitation.

The question Klara and the Sun pose is therefore far greater than whether Klara herself is human. It is whether humanity will continue to let private profit dictate technological development or consciously reorganise economic life so these remarkable productive powers serve society as a whole. Klara’s unquestioning self-sacrifice offers no solution to that contradiction. The working class does.

Selected bibliography: Ishiguro

   World Socialist Website

  • Beams, Nick. “AI development and the contradictions of capitalism.” World Socialist Web Site, 14 February 2026. A particularly useful Marxist treatment of AI as a productive force whose possibilities come into conflict with capitalist private ownership and the profit system. [wsws.org]
  • Hall, Tom. “How workers can fight the wave of AI layoffs.” World Socialist Web Site, 10 May 2026. Examines corporate deployment of AI in connection with layoffs and argues that the central issue is social control of the new technologies. [wsws.org]
  • Reed, Kevin. “Artificial intelligence and the film and television writers’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 10 May 2023. Especially relevant to the review because it documents the conflict over AI during the Writers Guild of America strike, including the WGA’s demands concerning AI-written material and the training of AI systems on writers’ work. [wsws.org]
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Published by freerein61

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