Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is a wonderful novel about a child’s Artificial Friend. Perfect for this current AI moment — even though it was authored before the current AI craze. It’s sensitive and thought provoking. NPR’s review called it “a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it.”
From The Atlantic’s review:
All fiction is an exercise in world-building, but science fiction lays new foundations, and that means shattering the old ones. It partakes of creation, but also of destruction. Klara trails a radiance that calls to mind the radiance also shed by Victor Frankenstein’s creature. He is another intelligent newborn in awe of God’s resplendence, until a vengeful rage at his abusive creator overcomes him. In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro leaves us suspended over a rift in the presumptive order of things. Whose consciousness is limited, ours or a machine’s? Whose love is more true? If we ever do give robots the power to feel the beauty and anguish of the world we bring them into, will they murder us for it or lead us toward the light?