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Fellow travelers, please check the ship's rearview mirrors and nuclear valves to adjust the frequency of the radio music. Ahead is about to land at the Saturn Picnic Lodge: Hologram Rose.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="8" > "HologramRose": a writing group formed by a group of players and game authors. We want to do something hardcore and interesting together. In a crazy universe, hopefully for a moment it will impress you—every traveler. </h1>
Klara and The sun
Clara and the Sun was released on March 2, 2021, the beginning of the month. It is Kazuo Ishiguro's eighth novel. Since I was reading a short and medium dystopian novel called Fahrenheit 451 during the time I received the book, and a little short story by Sholokhov.
So in fact, this novel, which Chinese translated 170,000 words, I didn't officially finish it until the early morning of the day before yesterday.
The affirmation from Hideo Kojima .jpg
When I saw the last page of the last part, I was about to lament that an artificial intelligence also had her own destiny, the sky of Xi'an was an unnatural grayish yellow, and the light pollution of the city shallowly outlined the vague outline of some kind of distant air passenger.
I knew that the sandstorm was coming to Guanzhong, and that on such a night there was no Clara and her sun, so I put down my book, climbed into bed, and tightly covered the dry quilt, fantasizing that a world without a sun had quietly descended, just tonight.
Please remember to wear a mask
Similar to Kara in Detroit, Kazuo Ishiguro's Clara is also one of many advanced artificial intelligence bodies born in the future. The same question is explored in movies, novels, and games related to many related themes: if artificial intelligence exists, what will their specific manifestations be? How we humans will handle the relationship with increasingly iteratively evolving robots. When will AI begin to have self-awareness and destroy such a flexible way of life that humans already have.
All this is the direction that these works of art want to explore.
#何为克拉拉
Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Clara and the Sun, is a bionic narrator who tells the story of an unusually intelligent bionic clara who accompanies her employer's family through the most difficult times of her life.
Josie, a little girl from the employer's family, is terminally ill because she has been promoted (genetically modified). Clara, on the other hand, started from her faith in the sun, believing that it could nourish Josie and her family.
At the end of the story, artificial intelligence seems to have been eradicated on a large scale, and Clara has been abandoned in the accumulation field of waste robots, no longer able to move her limbs, recalling her life as a bionic person.
#何为变人
The story of Detroit: Becoming Human is much more complex, and in the near future, as the intelligence of bionic people becomes more and more sophisticated, there is a partial awakening of consciousness, which was initially considered a system failure, and later was regarded as a thorny problem.
Starting from the different narratives of the three protagonists, it describes a history of blood and tears about bionic people finding themselves and fighting for rights, and in the setting of the game, it also provides players with many possible and triggered endings.
#以创造力划开界限
In Clara, josie, a terminally ill little girl, runs out of time, and her mother wants Clara to learn all of Josie's demeanor and actions, and then let her take on the responsibility of prolonging her daughter's life.
"It was with this idea that Chrissey (Mother) carefully selected you. She believes that you are the one who is most capable of learning Josie. Not only superficial learning, but also deep and complete learning. There was no difference until the first Josie and the second Josie. ”
The father of the little girl Josie objected, arguing that even replacing Josie with artificial intelligence could not really become herself, that is: how does a person become his/her own?
"Do you believe that there is a human heart?" I'm not just referring to that organ, of course. I'm talking about the literary meaning of the word. popularity. Do you believe there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us unique individuals. ”
《黑镜：Be Right Back》
In the second season of the show "Black Mirror", an episode called "Be Right Back" (or back), the hypothetical scenes in "Clara" are also elaborated. Martha's husband, Ash, once again died in a car accident. In order to soothe the grief in her heart, she decided to buy an artificial intelligence robot that recreates her husband to accompany her.
But as the contact time became longer and longer, Martha gradually realized that although this "husband" was like the one in the past, he still could not replace the position of the previous one, so that while observing this "husband", he was like a corpse.
So at the end of the episode, Martha leaves the robot on top of the attic forever.
Illustration in English: The picture shows the beginning of the story
Similarly, despite Clara's portrayal of Josie, even though she even has her own moral judgments, her pursuit of art, her understanding of life, her subtle observations of human nature.
But it all still ended in failure, and Clara made the wrong judgment: "I believe that after Josie's death I can play her well, yes, the human heart is difficult to imitate, but it is still limited, as long as it is a limited thing, it can be done by hard work." 」 ”
It is clear that Clara underestimated man's infinity, as well as the indivisibility of human beings as imperfect individuals.
Promotional posters
When Josie's mother says to Clara: As long as you play Josie well, then all the love she has received in the past will be accepted by you. But Clara's reaction was:
"If it makes everyone feel better, do it."
On the selfish proposition, Clara has clearly lost her qualifications to become a human being, and perhaps It is said that Kazuo Ishiguro never intended to portray Clara as a real human individual like other science fiction works. All of Clara's actions are "altruistic", and from the moment she came to the Josie family, or from the moment she was made, her mission was to serve her employer and nothing else.
This is also fundamentally different from all other science fiction works: in the vast majority of works, it is often defined as people based on the awakening of artificial intelligence, or how such groups approach humans and how they possess complex emotions and intelligence.
In "Clara and the Sun", Kazuo Ishiguro seems to choose his own path: to distance artificial intelligence like Clara from real humans by describing how close to humans, how reasonable, and how to possess higher intelligence to exclude itself. This is particularly difficult, and it is particularly difficult for a slightly older literary creator to be exposed to such avant-garde modern propositions.
And in Detroit: Becoming Human, how does this issue be explained? I want to go back to the second chapter, "The Painter," marcus's wonderful interaction with the painter Karl.
Karl always believed that Marcus had the same infinite heart, creativity as humans, and guided Marcus to find himself in the process of artistic creation.
"Artistic creation is not about copying the real world, but about adding its own interpretations and additions to it. Imagine something that doesn't exist, something you've never seen before. ”
And Marcus also completed the task that Karl gave him very well. In Detroit, the game gives a simple and intuitive definition of whether or not to be human, but this definition is also related to human infinity and creativity: as long as individual bionic humans have the same imagination ability as humans, then their awakening is sooner or later.
#以社会关系划开界限
Kara's setting is almost identical to Clara's: a latest bionic man placed in a window with the aim of being bought by real humans and then served as a servant of the family. However, in "Detroit", there is no sense of alienation between humans and robots. I'm not talking about the later robot revolution, the situation of incompatibility. But in real life, bionic people have been successfully implanted in people's real lives, freed from distrust, more like a drug invasion.
For example, in the relationship between Alice, her father, and Carla, similar to the deception technique used by Kazuo Ishiguro in Clara, the player does not know until the end that Alice is also a member of the bionic people, and the reason why the father bought Alice in the first place is probably because he wants to make up for the pain of losing his real daughter.
It was the player group that was deceived, and we had to admit under the design of the game: "Oh, it turns out that the bionic people are really no different from humans, and they have already tricked me into it." "This is largely because the bionic community in Detroit fits the missing part of Clara, which is the sense of identity as a real human being.
Kazuo Ishiguro: The master of time, memory, and self-deception that make up the abyss
In Clara's world, all the people regard her as a "friend of the mood", and in fact the servants who are employed, even the old servants in the house, can command her at will. This must have led to the concept of bionic humans not completing the erasure of human alienation in the world of the former. Even when Josie was finally going to college, he said to Clara, "Ah, this may be the last time we will meet, next time you will not be here." After a brief sentence, he hurried away. Where can you feel that this is an old friend who has been together for many years and is about to separate?
Obviously, the real reason why the AI in "Clara" has not completed the "transformation" is because it has not completed the construction of the social relationship network in real society. The bionic people in this world have always followed behind their masters, altruistically, and even paid for their lives.
In Detroit, the opposite is true, marcus mentally becomes the son of the old painter; while Carla and Alice establish a mother-son relationship with each other, Alice establishes a father-daughter relationship with her father; and even the player can feel the completely equal professional competition in the plot section where Connor and Hank fall in love and kill each other.
In Detroit, almost every awakening of ai-intelligence is related to the realization that there is a real social position in this society, and that bionic humans are so close to humans that they blend into human life at the same time: both humans and bionic humans have to reach real communicative relationships in many places.
The self in the social sense is sought after by the bionic people, and in reality it is still treated inferiorly, and an inevitable revolution is bound to come, which is why Marcus wants to lead all the bionic people to pursue themselves and gain rights. This gap made the situation in the second half of Detroit take for granted.
#另: Counterpoint polyphony and first-person deception
Both Clara and Detroit tell their stories from the first point of view of the bionic man, but there are obviously fundamental differences in their design intentions.
"Counterpoint polyphony" is Kundera's writing technique, which aims to have multiple parallel and equal lines in the creative structure of the work, which can be from the narrative perspective or the structure of the work. The purpose of this technique is to make multiple lines resonate in their connotations until they bring out a grander, more central theme.
The three-protagonist technique used in "Detroit" is actually a pseudo-"counterpoint polyphony": a complete story is constructed by narrating three equal linear plots separately, but in fact, the story of the three people does not have a complementary relationship, and at a certain point in time, there is a crossover of their own horizontal resonance and plot line. But in terms of infrastructure, it is in line with Kundera's concept of counterpoint polyphony.
In fact: Throughout the story of Detroit, we look at our own behavior through a multi-protagonist approach, as well as the behavior of the last protagonist we have manipulated; and we examine the various hot issues that occur in the city of Detroit with this unique worldview. But the problem is that the game itself makes a strict distinction between bionic humans and people, and at the same time strives to constantly prove that the difference between the two is so small that it can be called a person.
And the three protagonists who are also controllable by the player are all from the bionic camp, which leads to the fact that in the process of playing "Detroit", there is always an objective gap in our observation of the real human group, and we always stand on the opposite side: the bionic human perspective to examine our "self", although there must also be individuals who understand the bionic human, such as the painter Carl.
"A Strange Moment"
But in essence, we still look at it from the outside. No real information is available. In the value setting of the entire game of "Detroit", it is always on the side of the bionic man, which leads to a certain extent: "distortion of information".
"Clara" also unfolds from the first-person perspective of the bionic clara. Kazuo Ishiguro, on the other hand, has defined Clara as an individual who is very close to a human being from the very beginning. From the perspective of the theme of "human heart", Clara proves that she is not actually human. The reason for constructing such a tortuous narrative structure is probably that the author himself wants to make a new point about our current anxiety about artificial intelligence, that is, instead of worrying about the unrealistic future of artificial intelligence controlling human beings, it is better to think carefully about what is unique to human beings.
Kazuo Ishiguro's usual trick is to deceive the reader, and unlike Mrs. Deloway's method of compressing the time of telling a life story in a matter of days, Clara is more like putting the present time on hold, packaging the past: and Clara's (my) long life as what is happening in the present.
Ms. Woolf's work also contains self-deception about time
So much so that it is not until the last moments of the book that the reader realizes that this is just a dying memory of a robot (me) that is about to be scrapped. And sitting in the courtyard, the scene of mechanical limbs being broken on the ground makes people feel lost and lonely. It turns out that Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a hoax about time, but only wrote the readers as Clara.
And such deceptive narratives are also intended to write people themselves as non-human bionic humans. And this is also the charm of Kazuo Ishiguro's words, in a black absurd tragicomedy, repeatedly tapping the memories of human groups.
#克拉拉和她的无神寓言
In "Clara and the Sun", the artificial intelligence AFs have been modified by humans for a long time, and they can use solar energy to maintain their normal operation, although Clara has even more than ordinary human wisdom, but still has a special belief in the sun. The sun is the source of power that gives this robot its activities in the world, and it is also considered to be the source of energy that nourishes the whole world, so it is not similar to the mother who created our life: with such reverence.
No picture: Put Zhang Connor
Clara's reverence for the sun comes more like a traditional, ancient parable in which you simply transcend your cognition and reverently believe in an atheistic being, the sun. Clara worshipped the sun as a deity and prayed that it would cure Josie of his terminal illness. But unfortunately, such absurd beliefs also prove the sad fact that Clara cannot be transformed, and this intelligent robot has been understanding all this with a set of independent program algorithms all the time, and may even know nothing about what is really happening in our world
This time Chinese edition and the English edition of the book cover use the same design
The atheistic belief of a bionic man sounds rather grotesque in the Style of Ishiguro. The writer didn't focus on explaining why AI could understand this or not, or whether they were smart or not. All of this is a very minor issue in the writer's pen, but Clara and the Sun nevertheless writes a frightening science fiction phenomenon: a godless fable of a bionic man.
He did not prove that Clara was close to man in behavior by such a thing, but on the contrary, it was precisely because of Clara's "classical" behavior that she was truly isolated from the people of that era.
The closer Clara's behavior is to that of a real human being, the more pronounced her flaws in complete "altruism" become. So Kazuo Ishiguro doesn't mind constantly anthropomorphizing Clara infinitely in his writings, and the uncanny valley effect will eventually lead such descriptions to a "more unreal" that reflects the uniqueness of true human nature.
A moment after finishing the book, I hid in the bed, staring out the window at the "guests" who came from afar, without the sun. I've always imagined this:
"There is no sun."
In the distant times before the bionic man had arrived, I fell into a deep sleep until the pattern of the sun shone on my face.
Come to think of it, sometimes it's better to be an accomplice than a whistleblower – just as someone who meets in a pool of water ends up being a ballad, we're gamers, we're hologram Roses.