As I get older I am more optimistic about human nature

Madrid, Mar 8 (EFE) .- Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize in Literature, believes that as he gets older he has become a person "a little more optimistic about human nature", although he believes that artificial intelligence poses challenges to the current society, such as mass unemployment, on which it is necessary to reflect.

These societal challenges appear in his latest novel, "Klara and the Sun" (Anagram), which he presented this Monday at a telematic press conference in which he was convinced that artificial intelligence "is going to eliminate most of the jobs "that are known today and that" are currently considered part of the intellectual elite.

This is the first novel published by the British writer, born in Nagasaki in 1954 and author of works such as "What remains of the day" (Booker Prize) or "The inconsolables" (Cheltenham Prize), after being awarded in 2017 with the Nobel Prize in Literature.

As he did in "Never leave me", the Nobel Prize again turns to science fiction through Klara, an AA, an Artificial Friend, specialized in childcare.

Klara will be destined to take care of a sick girl and, although she is an artificial being, she nevertheless poses very human questions, which Ishiguro transfers to the reader in his novel: "What is it that defines us as people? What is our role? in the world ?, what is love? ... "

Ishiguro has considered that it is not inevitable that society will become more technologically advanced and have fewer feelings, but he has recognized that such a trend exists today. "And one of the problems is that the business model of large technology companies does not favor the well-being of human beings," he noted.

And, although he has said that he is now more optimistic about human nature, he has indicated that he is less so about political systems or about how societies are organized: "I am concerned about the strength of liberal democracies."

It has also warned about the possibility that with these forms of artificial intelligence, liberal democracies have more difficult to compete with authoritarian societies that can make efficient economic decisions and have surveillance systems on all citizens in a very effective way: "The analysis of the left -right is no longer enough, "he said.

In all his works he has tried to show how in relation to power most people are "like servants" and there are enormous forces that control, the Nobel Prize in Literature has said.

In his latest novel, he explained, he was not so interested in determining whether Klara had emotions like humans or only recognized human emotions, but rather that he wanted to "look at human beings through this machine."

In the novel, this robot "becomes a metaphor for human impulses and assumes diverse aspects of them and, in his determination to do the best for the child, ends up resembling a father or mother."

"When it comes to taking care of our children we are like programmed machines. My mother was like that," said the writer, who has acknowledged that his mother influenced him for his novel "Klara and the Sun", although he wrote part of it before that she died, at the age of 92: "She didn't lose that childish faith in the good in the world either."

The author has assured that the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature did not influence him when writing this novel, since he had already a third of the book when he received the award.

"When I returned I hoped that my writing problems would have disappeared, I thought that my study would have been ordered and would be perfect, but everything was as I had left it before going to Stockholm. As if the Nobel Prize had been awarded to me on another planet", has remembered.

Ishiguro has explained that he does not write daily, as evidenced by the fact that this is his eighth novel. "I spend a lot of time thinking, reflecting, reading and talking for hours," said the author who has said that he never wants to write "just any book": "I'd rather not write anything than write any book."