Klara and the gift of curiosity

In October, a new movie will be released based on one of my favorite books, Klara and the Sun.

This has happened a lot for me recently (see The Three Body Problem, The Martian, Project Hail Mary, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow). I know it’s cliché to say that the book is better, but that has generally been my experience. The Martian was groundbreaking but when you force it into a 2-hour format for general consumption it becomes a forgettable action movie.

The Klara trailer doesn’t give me much hope. The cheery, jokey vibe, feels nothing like the experience I had reading the book, so I wanted to take this opportunity to share what made it special to me.

Note: I wrote a succinct, spoiler-free review back in 2024, so if you want the basics, I invite you to read that. For everybody else, let’s continue.

Klara is an advanced humanoid robot—an Artificial Friend (“AF”)—who was designed to be a companion for children. We follow along as Klara is purchased from her store, meets Josie, her child, and assists Josie’s family as they navigate the challenges of their world.

The story is told from Klara’s perspective, allowing the reader to see what she sees and feels. As a new robot, Klara is somewhat like a child, trying to piece together an understanding of the world, and the reader is brought along on that journey. We know from the beginning that Josie’s life is complicated and that there’s something unhealthy about her or her family, but neither we nor Klara understand what or why. The process of discovering what’s actually happening made the book very interesting.

As an AI, Klara sees things differently than humans see things. She often focuses on things that a human would dismiss and breezes over things a human would care about. She also sees the world with fresh eyes, which allows her to make observations I wouldn’t have considered. For example, she notices that humans go to great lengths to avoid loneliness. This fear of loneliness, she observes, is at the root of nearly all human decisions (a surprising insight that I would never have considered). At the same time, Klara is naive. At times, I found myself wondering if I could trust her observations and conclusions.

One of the themes that emerges throughout the story is the question of whether humans are replaceable. The robots in the story are different from humans, but they’re clearly intelligent and capable of doing human work. Klara often expresses simple emotions like joy and fear, which help her care for Josie. The humans caring for Josie, have greater emotional range, but it’s almost a liability. The mother’s grief over her other daughter’s death has left emotional scars, and her neighbor’s guilt has left her incapacitated in many ways. The humans are trying to hold it together, but they’re clearly volatile while Klara is endlessly patient, optimistic, and kind.

I was originally turned off by Klara’s obsession with the sun. She gets this idea in her mind that somehow the sun could help heal Josie from her sickness, and it was obvious to me that Klara was confused. I knew that the sun was a distant ball of gas, but to Klara, a solar-powered robot, it was a magical source of life and rejuvenation. I became certain that her programming as a robot (and her early formative experiences in the store), were throwing off her judgement. Clearly, she was blinded by what she was, and thus wasn’t able to see that her side-quests would have no effect and waste precious time.

But I was wrong. The sun healed Josie, not because it was an anthropomorphic life-giver that took pity on Josie, or respected Klara’s sacrifice. It healed Josie because it gave everyone hope. It gave them hope at their lowest moments, when they were willing to throw away logic, and try anything if it might help her get better. To Klara, the sun was God. It was her distant life giver and the provider of miracles. That’s why Klara didn’t want to tell the humans all the details of her plan. She knew there needed to be space for all of them to have faith.

This storyline about the sun impacted me because it was basically a speedrun of the religious-skepticism journey we often experience in the real world. We care so much about our worldview being evidence-based that we fail to realize that there are some things that evidence cannot give us. Things like hope, meaning, purpose, and a reason to act selflessly.

The sun also brings back the fundamental question. If a robot can heal a child by exercising faith in God and risking her life to save the ones she loves, then how can there be anything left that’s special about humans? Are the humans not doomed to obsolesce?

Online reviews for Klara and the Sun call it a “dystopian novel,” but I found the story quite hopeful. Human gene-editing, advanced artificial intelligence, and the obsolescence of humans are difficult topics to grapple with, but that world is coming fast. Some parts are already here. This story paints a picture of people finding a way to navigate it. Some people embrace the future (often paying heavy costs), some run from it, some fight it, and others accept it. But they all find a way.

You and I get to decide how we respond to our own changing world, but if I can take one lesson from Klara it would be to keep an open mind. We become so certain of what we know that we forget to leave space for what we don’t. Curiosity is a gift. If we allow it to fade as we mature, we lose the opportunity to see things that could change our lives for the better.