As an anthropologist, I am drawn to fiction for how it can help us to see how people have made their lives in the past, how we live in the world today, and how we might imagine more positive futures. 

In Norman Maclean’s partly autobiographical fictional story, A River Runs Through It, a fisherman, describing his craft, says “All there is to thinking…, is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible” (Maclean 1989, 92). 

In other words, good attention and thinking lets us make visible the invisible. It allows us to make visible the invisible through noticing.

As any anthropologist knows, employing deep noticing to understand the world around us—even in highly unfamiliar contexts—has the great potential to render the invisible visible. The unsettling that may result may be a necessary inducement for imagining better futures. Educational philosopher Maxine Greene writes about the importance of cultivating a “social imagination” that enables us to imagine the “otherwise”—ways of living and being that are more equitable and just than current systems. As Greene wrote, referring to learners, “imagining things being otherwise may be a first step toward acting on the belief they can be changed” (Greene 1995, 22). 

Klara and the Sun, the 2021 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, deploys deep noticing to explore themes of artificial intelligence, care, love, and what it means to be human (Ishiguro 2021). It follows Klara, an artificial friend who is a companion for a teenage girl named Josie. The novel explores human emotions and relationships while raising ethical questions about the role of technology in society.

Ishiguro doesn’t give us much detail about the robotic technology in Klara’s and Josie’s world. By contrast, Andy Weir’s science fiction novel The Martian is packed with technological details (Weir 2016). Klara and the Sun is not a work of science fiction. It’s a literary novel, focusing on relationships among people, on Klara’s interior perspectives, and on Klara’s quest to satisfy her purpose. Without the tech detail, the book invites personal connection and imagination, and it becomes more enduring across time. We don’t get bogged down in the technological details. 

Ishiguro leaves much to our imagination. We are left to wonder: What is this social context? Where and when is this story taking place? What is this technological process called “lifting”? What is the employment situation and why are some people in favor of having their children lifted and owning artificial friends, and others are not? We read that there is “growing and widespread concern” about artificial friends. Why is that? Have some people’s jobs been taken over by technology?

As readers, we don’t know the answers to these questions. Ishiguro’s lack of detail gives us the chance to connect to the story and think about society. We are empowered to bring our own imagination to make sense of the hints at the world that Ishiguro has created. 

I consider this kind of reader empowerment to be a gift from the author. As an anthropologist interested in aging, care, and robotics, on one level, the book provides me with an opportunity to think about why we might design and build robots, for what purpose, and with what features. On another, deeper level, the book enables me to consider the limits of where we might want to go, and where we are going, in our societies as we embrace robotics—and especially with recent developments in artificial intelligence. Readers see how people interact with Klara: some defending her from bullying children, some praising her as exceptionally empathetic, some fearing her. These interactions invite questions like: What makes humans special? What makes human relationships with other humans meaningful? What do we need and crave as humans in terms of relationships of love and care? Where might technology aid those human needs, and where might it impede them? What is the responsibility of engineers and designers to design with attention to human flourishing? 

I found this novel gripping because of the author’s depth of insight into human relationships and emotions. The book explores loneliness, grief, love, care, and attachment. The robotic friend context serves as a device to let us explore what we take for granted in our own lives. I teach engineers and designers, and that includes a class on design for aging.¹ To me, the book is a prompt to think carefully before we accidentally leverage design and engineering to erase meaningful interactions among people for the sake of technological fixes to societal problems.²

I like to imagine the decisions of those who designed these robots in this fictional world. What observations did they have about human relationships, about relations of care, of what to support and what might have been falling short? 

At the end of the novel, Klara chose to be alone in a spot in a junkyard, despite the offer to be moved closer to other artificial friends. Klara said, “No, thank you, Manager. You’re as kind as ever. But I like this spot. And I have my memories to go through and place in the right order” (Ishiguro 2021, 302). Klara is content. She has fulfilled her duty. As she says, “I gave good service and prevented Josie from becoming lonely” (Ishiguro 2021, 300).

Despite Klara’s positivity and satisfaction, I was sad when I read those final pages. It may be that my sadness tells us more about me and my implicit values than about Klara and the world she lives in. This makes sense: We always interpret the world around us—and literature—from our own perspectives.

No doubt because one of my research and teaching areas is in aging, and because I also spend a lot of time with my parents (in their 80s), I read the book in terms of experiences of aging. 

I think of my experiences with older adults in the United States. While some older adults may have dementia, and they may sit with their memories all a-jumble like Klara when she first gets to the junkyard, many simply have more of their lives behind them than in front of them and find it is important and meaningful to make sense of what their lives have been. On the final page of the novel The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, by Robert Dugoni, there is a line that reads, “There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back” (Dugoni 2018, 449). I will edit it to be gender inclusive, because I do not read this as a commentary on men in particular: “There comes a day in every person’s life when they stop looking forward and start looking back.”

When she was in the junkyard, Klara was at that point in her life. It may be hard for some of us to understand Klara’s contentment with the “slow fade,” with spending time alone in the junkyard until her batteries die. Klara had fulfilled her duty, and she found that it was time to slowly fade away. I may despair reading that because I see lost potential, or mistreatment and lack of respect, or a waste of a perfectly good robot; or maybe because I envision the inevitable death of my loved ones. I may despair for all of these reasons. And certainly, the novel left me unsettled by bringing me into a world characterized by deeply unsettled social, political, and economic arrangements and unsettled relations of care (Cook and Trundle 2020).

That final scene with Klara makes me think of how to design for meaning at all stages of life and for people unlike myself. Some years ago, I made a film about a 100-year old Needham man named Julius (Lynch and Yu 2011). Near the end of his life and our filming, Julius was briefly in a nursing home, and he was not happy with being there. One day I visited him, per his request, bringing a vanilla milkshake. Lying in his impersonal metal hospital bed, institutional beige walls and repetitive beeping noises surrounding us, Julius told me, between sips of milkshake, that nursing homes are our society’s “warehouses for the aged.” 

Clearly, Julius and Klara had different ideas of how to live out the end stages of a meaningful life. Klara and the Sun encourages me to ask questions about what makes a meaningful life—and at the expense or benefit of whom? I also consider the promise and peril of using robotics in contexts related to aging. This is a booming industry and already there are robots for keeping company for older adults, for providing medication to older adults, and for helping older adults stand and walk. 

My 83-year-old mother has Parkinson’s Disease. My father, six months older than my mother, is very physically fit. My father helps my mom dress, bathe, stand, and cook. He helps her out of bed in the middle of the night when she needs to use the toilet, interrupting his own sleep. Love always includes elements of interdependence and care. For my parents today, after 62 years of marriage, the explicit need for care dominates how they relate to each other. I talk to both my parents about how they feel about their relationships of dependence and interdependence now, including in relation to me, still their “baby” (I am the youngest of four children). My mother does not want my father to have to help her, but she also doesn’t want anyone else or anything else helping her. She resists all help that is not my father, and even that she only concedes when she sees no option. Dignity, love, respect, care, recognition, purpose, affection: all of these matter to my mother, and to both my parents, every day. 

Medication locked in a toolbox, for safe distribution by human caregivers. Photo by the author.

Would I want a Klara to live with my parents? Maybe. I would want to know how a robot would interact with my mother, with me, with my father, and with their friends. How would it become part of our lives? Would it still allow us to fulfill my father’s and my senses of duty and of desire to also care for my mother? Would there be love embedded in the relationship? I would care about safety: both physical and emotional. Beyond the caregiving requirements of the immediate moment, would my mother’s Klara appreciate her for the histories and memories that comprise her identity and our understanding of her? Would her humanity matter to her robot caregiver?

These are the kinds of questions—humanistic, social scientific, technological—that motivate me in research on care and aging. I am especially interested in imagining the otherwise about eldercare and the systems (e.g., people, technology, communication) that support older adults, and I appreciate that Klara and the Sun fosters that imagination in me.

Notes

[1] I co-teach Engineering for Humanity with Ela Ben-Ur, a designer and mechanical engineer. The entire curriculum, lectures, and samples of student work are at https://courses.olin.edu/e4h/.

[2] See my TEDx talk on this topic https://www.ted.com/talks/caitrin_lynch_engineers_go_wild

References

Cook, Joanna, and Catherine Trundle. 2020. “Unsettled Care: Temporality, Subjectivity, and the Uneasy Ethics of Care.” Anthropology and Humanism” 45 (2): 178-183. 

Dugoni, Robert. 2018. The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell: A Novel. Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, p. 449.

Greene, Maxine. 1995. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2021. Klara and the Sun. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Lynch, Caitrin, and Titi Yu. 2011. “My Name is Julius.” Documentary film.

Maclean, Norman. 1989. “A River Runs Through It” In A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Weir, Andy. 2016. The Martian: A Novel. New York: Broadway Books.

Caitrin Lynch, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology at Olin College of Engineering, where she teaches courses in anthropology, design, engineering, and entrepreneurship. She is the author of two books: Retirement on the Line: Age, Work, and Value in An American Factory, and Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka’s Global Garment Industry. With Jason Danely, she edited the collection Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course. In addition to scholarly works, Lynch has created a website (with Sara Hendren) that explores disability and design, “Engineering at Home”(https://engineeringathome.org/) ; and a website called “Buying Pains,” about what’s in our clothes that is not on the label (https://www.buyingpains.org/) (a collaboration with engineering students/alums Adam Coppola, Jasper Katzban, Jennifer Lee, and Meagan Rittmanic).

Cite as: Lynch, Caitrin. 2024. “Imagining the Otherwise in Aging, Care, and Robotics.” In “Independence as Aspiration and Impossibility: Images from India towards the Ends of Life,” edited by Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori, American Ethnologist website, 7 August 2024. [https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/aging-globally/imagining-the-otherwise-in-aging-care-and-roboticsby-caitrin-lynch/]