Klara and the Sun is a novel written through the compound eyes of a constitutionally ingenuous artificial intelligence. I inhaled it in a few days and have been pondering its questions on love, faith, contingency, and authenticity since.

I recommend it! But this post is about an aspect of the story that its author, Kazuo Ishiguro, chose not to interrogate very deeply.

Why will robots and renewable energy not massively improve our quality of life?

I can think of some reasons: climate-induced systems collapse, great power conflict, bioweapons, wealth concentration, various Yudkowskyian misalignments. These are plausible reasons, yet it often feels like the prevailing meta-reason underpinning it all is "because it would be inconvenient to the story that I want to tell." In Klara, this presents as a Nondescript Humanity Failure Mode. Gestured at, tastefully implied, a bullet unbitten.^🦷

Authors, I get it. We need our narratives to have conflict and adversity. Material prosperity deflates the stakes. But if we're uncritical about this bias, we overrepresent the bad outcomes and instill unjustified fatalism and declinism in the culture.

Look at The Pudding's excellent piece on the science fiction trends of the century.^🍮

We're in the Scared Straight! era of our collective imagination. The future is so potentially bad, the systemic forces so overpowering, we have to use every opportunity we have to show people how fucked-up Australia might become.

I don't think these fears are unfounded — they have a basis in our material reality — we're just overselling them. And so my fear is that we internalize this pessimism so deeply that even when a story isn't expressly concerning one of the plausible hazards of the twenty-first century, our writers backdrop them by default, and we ourselves reject the fiction if they're not there.^🐧

If you want to tell a story set in the future, why not show some of the possible nice things that could happen? Black Mirror does this a little, but almost always in a way that says the nice thing is clearly not worth it.

I want a White Mirror. A stage for exploring the problems we might face if things go okay.^🖖

For instance, to my bolded question, you might respond "automating human survival" is not flourishing. A world wherein no one has to work will be filled with ennui. Great! Show me that story. Show me how you think there's more to humanity than defiantly trudging through ashes.

Show me what happens in an immortal society if someone chooses to die. What do you do if your lover wants to completely change how they look? How does a democratic group of people decide how and whether they can eliminate an invasive species? What happens to linguistics once we all speak the same language?

Treat the future with curiosity. Reject scarcity and cruelty as the sole sources of drama. I sincerely believe it's possible to do without being didactic or propagandizing, and if done well, paradoxically, it might inspire us to actually bring it about.

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