Is Klara sentient?

I've been reading Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel Klara and the Sun. It stimulated thoughts about sentience, which is a subject that interests me.

Klara is an AF. An Artificial Friend. A machine with the appearance of a human; in Klara's case, a human female ["you look kind of French", Josie said]. An android. The narrator of the story.

But really, Klara is an observer. Of human behaviour and, in her reactions to that behaviour, we move closer to an answer to the question: Is Klara sentient?

The story begins with Klara on display in an AF store, being examined by prospective purchasers. She spends her time, with her fellow AF Rosa, observing people and happenings in the street that she can see through the store's window:

"Rosa missed so many signals. She would often exclaim delightedly at a pair going by, and I would look and realize that even though a girl was smiling at her AF, she was in fact angry with him."

"I became puzzled, then increasingly fascinated by the more mysterious emotions passers-by would display in front of us."

Klara is sold to a family to be an AF to 12½ year old Josie. What follows - which I'm not going to detail, so as to avoid spoilers - encompasses a few years of their lives together. There are dark moments, happy moments, sad moments. In some ways, the story feels like a fairy tale; the Sun, for instance, is anthropomorphised - and has a role to play:

[my mind had become filled with...the question of why the Sun hadn't yet sent his special help...perhaps he'd been correct at that point to wait]

This story is like peeling an onion; bit by bit, truths are exposed. There are hints of this in the early language; numerous references to 'AFs' precede the revelation of 'Artificial Friend'. The author is challenging our imagination. But my purpose here is less about the narrative as such and more about answering the question in the title.

There are various definitions and interpretations of sentience. The most commonly held view is that a sentient being has feelings. Feelings of pain and other sensations but also of emotions, consciousness, maybe even self-awareness. Much has been written about the extent to which animals exhibit sentience. The European Union's Treaty of Lisbon of 2009 declares "Member States shall, since animals are sentient beings, pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals".

Klara seems to be intuitive about the feelings of passers by that she observes from the store window:

"When AFs did go by us they almost always acted oddly, speeding up their walk and keeping their faces turned away. I wondered then if perhaps we - the whole store - were an embarrassment to them...........another possibility came to me, that the AFs weren't embarrassed, but were afraid."

"'Those people seem so pleased to see each other', Manager said. And I realized she'd been watching them as closely as I had. 'Yes, they seem so happy', I said. 'But it's strange because they also seem upset.'"

Is intuition an indicator of sentience?

Josie, when talking to Klara before the purchase, is sensitive to Klara's feelings: "I don't want you coming against your will." Klara recounts an episode where she observes a Beggar Man and his dog, whom she believes have died. "I felt sadness then." 

Throughout the story, Klara exhibits feelings. She is "waiting anxiously". "Wishing to give [Josie] privacy." "An anxiety passed through my mind." "now that I was aware, I was able to see another tiny signal."

Feelings ands awareness - surely sentience indicators.

But can intuition and sadness be learned? At one point Klara says "I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me." Which suggests the possibility that artificial intelligence can be programmed to learn - and to learn how to feel. Even so, once Klara has feelings, I would advocate that she has become sentient, and the AF becomes a sentient being.

Why am I so interested in sentience? My answer to that is: how can you not be? Artificial intelligence will be one of the most important challenges for humankind in the future and we will need to understand, or at least address, the challenge. I think sentience is one of the reasons I enjoy reading and watching science fiction. It's too easy to dismiss SF as mere entertainment but the very best examples explore humanity's future issues. It's one of the abiding themes of Star Trek: The Next Generation; indeed, there is a whole episode written around it - The Measure Of A Man. 

I won't live to see the emergence of beings about whom philosophers will debate their sentience - Commander Data, an android, lives in the 24th century - but my grandchildren probably will. I hope they will treat the issues with the seriousness they deserve. Maybe they'll read this blog and perhaps watch some Star Trek.

The world that Klara inhabits is a futuristic one and, in addition to the central question about Klara and sentience, it has very dark parts which are not explored, more hinted at. Although essentially a fairy tale, it raises deep questions and doesn't always provide answers. I loved the way in which the author takes the reader, as though a Friend, on a journey of exploration; he shows me glimpses of life but encourages me to explore the meanings.

This is the first Ishiguro novel which I have read and I certainly will read more. I have in the past read a number of prize-winning novels - Midnight's Children and Rites Of Passage come to mind - and often found them a hard read. Worthwhile but a bit of a struggle. Klara and the Sun is never that. Eminently readable, enjoyable and even, in a way, moving.

Standing Our Ground

I've been reading an excellent book. Standing Our Ground; A Mother's Story is written by Lucy McBath, who is a Democratic Congresswoman for the 6th Congressional District of the state of Georgia. It's a tale of hardship and adversity, leading to a determination to be an agent of change. As Hillary Clinton said, "Lucy, in the face of tragedy, turned her sorrow into a strategy, and her mourning into a movement".

The author's early life is charted through the lenses of family, race and religion. As a devout black woman, brought up in Illinois by parents who were active in the civil rights movement, she describes seeing the ransacking of Mr. K's Grocery Store while, alongside, Mr. Dunn's Record Store was untouched.

"Did Mr. K's store get firebombed and Mr. Dunn's didn't because Mr. K was a white in the black part of town, while Mr. Dunn was African American and lived right there in the neighborhood with the rest of us?" At the age of seven, "I was still years away from grasping just how betrayed black America was feeling that day."

It was the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis.

"I knew who Dr. King was. He was our prince of peace; a relentless advocate for nonviolent resistance to racial and economic injustice...I find it curious now that my first vivid childhood memory is of a black man cut down in an unspeakable act of gun violence. The tentative connections I began to make on that day would foreshadow my future, both the tragedy that awaited me, and the activism it would provoke."

34 years later, McBath relates "my 17 year old son was gunned down in Florida on Black Friday 2012." Jordan had been driven by a friend, with another boy, to a gas station to get some gum. They were playing music loud on the car stereo. A middle aged white man took exception to the volume and, after a verbal altercation, shot the boys, killing Jordan.

There was a witness to the shooting and the perpetrator - Michael Dunn - was soon arrested. He claimed he was acting in self-defence; his lawyer would use Stand Your Ground as the centrepiece of his defence.

In 2005 the state of Florida adopted the Stand Your Ground law. It is based on 17th century English common law and the concept of "an Englishman's home is his castle". Florida’s Stand Your Ground” law states, “A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat [my formatting] and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself."

In other words, Michael Dunn had only to demonstrate that he believed he was in danger in order to justify his use of force.

At trial in 2014, the jury convicted Dunn on four charges, including attempted murder but, with the jury deadlocked on the first degree murder charge, the judge declared a mistrial on that count. In a second trial a few months later, Dunn was found guilty of first degree murder.

At the sentencing hearing after the second trial, Lucy McBath gave the following statement:

"I choose to forgive you, Mr. Dunn, for taking my son's life. I choose to release the seed of bitterness and anger that would not honor my son's life. I choose to walk in the freedom of knowing God's justice has been served...I pray that God has mercy on your soul."

Thus began Lucy McBath's advocacy on the issue of what she calls "our nation's perilously lenient gun laws". Working with reform groups and in the media spotlight, she becomes an important campaigner for gun law reform, eventually leading her to Congress.

This is a profound, enlightening and moving story. Written simply but with an attention to detail, particularly in regard to gun law history and charting subsequent massacres. To a non-American, it is frankly shocking; how can a nation live like this?

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Postscripts:

"Looking back now, I'm shocked at my naiveté. Growing up in the civil rights movement, travelling to marches and protest rallies with my parents, I should have known better....it is why I feel such a charge now to help save lives, and why I will never allow the hope for a more equitable future to grow cold in my heart." [Congresswoman Lucy McBath]

37 of the 50 states of the USA have Stand Your Ground laws or case law/precedent.

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Notes:

3½ minutes, 10 Bullets. A documentary film made following the author through the two jury trials. It won a Special Jury Prize for Social Impact at the Sundance Festival. Also an Academy Award nomination. You can watch it on Amazon Prime Video.

The Armor Of Light. Emmy award winning film which follows an Evangelical minister, Rev. Scheck, as he meets Lucy McBath and they form an unexpected alliance on gun control issues as "they bravely attempt to make others consider America’s gun culture through a moral lens." Also on Amazon Prime Video, I believe. armoroflightfilm.com

UPDATE: I may have misled you; it seems these films are not available on any UK streaming service. Not sure why that is; maybe licensing issues, I don't know. Sorry. Read the book!

There's only one...

This is my digital art. It can be yours for just £5 million. Payable using ethereum. You become the sole possessor of the non-fungible token (NFT). Which means that, although my millions of readers can see it on the blog for free, only YOU will own it. 

What do mean, it's a fraud? Who would purchase this?

The digital artist Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, recently sold one at auction for $69 million. Grimes sold a collection of digital art works for $6.3 million. So there is a market. Which I aim to take by storm.

Want to see the world's first ever tweet, by Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter? Here it is. Want to be the sole owner? Current auction price is around $2.5 million.

Hurry, hurry.....

Icarus

As everyone knows, Icarus had some wings made by his father, Daedalus, out of wax. As do the young, he ignored his father's advice not to fly too near the sun and...

Oops. "What did I tell you, son?" This is by Jacob Peter Gowy in the 17th century. It is credited to Gowy but is remarkably similar to one painted by Rubens. Mm.

Enough of fine art. I recently read a book The Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Putin's Secret Doping Empire by the eponymous Dr Grigory Rodchenkov. In parallel there is a movie Icarus. I watched the movie after reading the book, but more on that later.

Rodchenkov was a Russian chemist who rose to become the Director of Russia's Anti Doping Centre. By his own confession, his job involved not only research and development into methods for detecting athletes who were taking proscribed performance-enhancing drugs but also, on behalf of the Russian state, devising protocols to ensure that the country's athletes did not test positive for those drugs. He succinctly describes the process as "doublethink", referencing George Orwell's 1984.

The book, written after he defected to the US, is a detailed account of everything he did and everybody who was directly or (as was allegedly Russian President Putin) indirectly involved. It culminates in the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia in 2014. The planning leading up to it included the 2012 Olympics in London, which he describes as "the dirtiest in history", as a result of 126 negative tests subsequently, with reanalysis with later methodology, shown to be positive.

He describes Sochi as 'the biggest sports scandal the world has ever seen'. He recounts in painstaking detail all the preparations for a massive sting operation, the purpose to ensure that the event was an untainted success for Russia's athletes and the nation. The drugs taken by the athletes in the lead-up period; taking and storing clean urine samples before doping, to be swapped with on the day samples before testing; falsification of records. This is written with a straight face: he knows what he is doing, he knows the extent of Russia's state-sponsored doping regime, he just carries on doing his job with vigour and apparently without remorse.

Later, as the net closes in, he flees to the US and collaborates with Bryan Fogel, a film director and talented amateur cyclist, on what becomes Icarus. Fogel had been working on a film as an exposé of doping in professional cycling but he becomes fascinated by Rodchenkov's story and revelations. The film centres around interviews with Rodchenkov and, driven by Rodchenkov's Orwell fascination, the narrative is punctuated with quotations, starting with "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act". Rodchenkov's book, written after the release of the film, also makes frequent use of 1984: "There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad".

In the book's introductory note, Rodchenkov says "What follows is not an attempt to make excuses for my actions, nor to justify them. It strives to be one thing above all: honest. I will not shy away from giving a full and candid account of what I did, and nor do I ask you to forgive me".

Icarus won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2018. The book won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2020.

In the end, do I forgive him? No. Rodchenkov is clearly proud of what he did: the achievement of being the best in his field, and creating a spectacularly successful operation to cheat the world of sport, athletes and fans. His claim to be honest is belied by Orwell's truth/untruth observation; he created untruths. Factual yes; honest, no; truthful, no.

So, you ask, should I read the book first or the movie? Normally this is an easy question for me. Generally I would read a book then be disappointed in the movie, because a movie necessarily can't display the subtleties of the written word. In this case though, I think you could easily do it either way round. I read the book first but if I had seen the movie first I would have been stimulated to read the book, in order to experience the full detail of everything.

You could possibly read the book  and not bother with the film, but seeing Rodchenkov himself sheds extra light onto the stage. Where the book is dry, the film brings the person and his actions to life. Both were extremely enjoyable for me and I definitely recommend them, even to people don't particularly like sport.

The Census

Census Day in the UK is 21 March 2021. Got my form. 65 questions to answer. If you have 5 people in your household, that will be 269 questions. You should manage that just in time for the next census, in 2031. Like painting the Forth Bridge.

So, starting. Question H1: who usually lives here? Tick all that apply. There are 10 options. Although option 1 "Me" is the obvious one, I diligently check all the others in case there is a "family of swallows nesting in the eaves" option. Question H4: who else is staying here overnight on 21 March 2021? Ah, so maybe I'm not supposed to do this yet. I go back to the cover page, which clearly states "complete the census on 21 March 2021 or as soon as possible after". Yep, that's me not bothering to read the instructions.

9 days to go....

Censuses (is that the correct plural? Censi?) have been conducted in the UK since 1841 - or 1801 if you count unofficial versions. And you thought it was the Domesday Book in 1086! According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William The Conqueror "sent he his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out 'How many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.'" So a cow census really.

Two hundred years later, the Hundred Rolls included enquiries commissioned by Edward I to record the adult population for judicial and taxation purposes. A proper census.

dailytelegraph.com.au tells me that "in Babylon in about 3800BC a team of men headed out to tally up the numbers of men, women, children, livestock, slaves, butter, milk, honey and vegetables in the kingdom. The primary reason was to figure out how much food was needed to feed the population, but the figures also gave an idea of how many men were available for military service and how much they could be taxed without starving them." So, frankly, we were a bit behind in the census stakes. But, given today's sensitivities, I bet there won't be a 2021 question about slaves.

Who decided the census would be every ten years? And why is it always in a year ending in one? [I'm not even going to mention Tottenham Hotspur here - be quiet, Simon!]  There are no answers to this; someone tossed a coin.

I checked the headline facts from the 2011 UK census, to see if there were any interesting revelations. Nope.

Censuses exist to allow the government to control our lives even more than they already do. 47% of UK households keep pigeons! Let's put a pigeon tax in the next budget.

in nine days time I shall do my civic (and legal) duty and complete the online form. You will be utterly relieved to know that I shall not again post about censuses! Except maybe in ten year's time. Something to look forward to, readers....

The Irishman

The Irishman is not just a movie; it's a three and a half hour movie experience. Robert De Niro stars in Martin Scorsese's epic adaptation of Charles Brandt's book I Heard You Paint Houses. The book tells the true story of the alleged mafia hitman Frank Sheeran and the tale is narrated by De Niro as Sheeran, who describes his associations with, and actions on behalf of, infamous mobsters of the fifties and sixties.

Prominent among these is the teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. I remember, as a teenager, hearing about Hoffa, his corrupt practices, support of Richard Nixon and antagonism to the Kennedys. This was the period when John Kennedy was elected President, appointed his brother Bobby as Attorney General, and subsequently became involved with the infamous Bay Of Pigs shambles. It was a time when the world saw hope in a "new dawn" under the leadership of a young, charismatic American President, but there were always rumours of shady underworld associations, including in his assassination. The film overtly references these events as the background to its portrayal of, literally, mob rule.

It's a monster of a film and the epithet "epic" is warranted. It's a men's tale, with little in the way of female casting. I suppose in a way it glorifies violence and corruption and Sheeran displays no remorse. But there is a sadness and inevitability of decline as the years, and society's evolution, move on.

The title of the  book is in reference to saying, "I heard you paint houses"—a mob code meaning: I heard you kill people, the "paint" being the blood that splatters when bullets are fired into a body. This tells you everything about the film. It has echoes of The Godfather and The Sopranos - and, I guess, pretty much every mobster film/series ever made. What distinguishes it is the real life context.

De Niro, and his co-stars Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, were in their late 70s when they shot the film and some remarkable CGI "de-aging" took place in production. It's an A list cast with an A list director but lost out to Parasite in the 2019 Oscars. I thought both films were excellent and I couldn't choose one or the other. In fact I could watch them again - which is rare for me.

Also rare for me is not whingeing about any film over two and half hours. In this case, it just seems to need the time and never drags.

Much recommended. If you enjoy gangster movies.