PHARMAKONS OF CONNECTION - Technodystopian Loneliness and the Artificial Other in Brian Aldiss and Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

This thesis explores the figure of the artificial other as a literary vessel to examine human anxieties regarding the developments in artificial intelligence and hyper-capitalism. To carry out this project, the essay realizes a side-by-side analysis of Brian Aldiss’ Supertoys Trilogy (1969/2001) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) in order to chart how these technologically driven anxieties are exhibited in each work, and how they have evolved over fifty years from speculative science-fiction to near-future realism. The central aim of this project is to investigate how the introduction of commodified artificial agents into the familial sphere impacts human and non-human alienation. To achieve this, the thesis constructs an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes Donna Haraway’s posthuman cyborg, Nigel Thrift’s commodified supertoys, Sherry Turkle’s psychology of simulated intimacy, Mois Navon’s unethical conscious artificial servitude, and Mark Featherstone’s notion of the technodystopia and the technological pharmakon. The main results of the analysis demonstrate that in a relentless pursuit of profit and an optimized existence, the narratives’ technodystopian societies purchase artificial companions in an attempt to cure human loneliness. However, because these cyborgs are commodified and programmed to perform intimacy, they actually generate new forms of alienation that technology cannot fix. Thus, the liberatory potential of the posthuman cyborg is subverted by the texts’ capitalist markets by reducing entities of varying degrees of consciousness to disposable appliances with a planned obsolescence date. Ultimately, the thesis concludes that genuine connection in these narratives only emerges when humans and androids are cast out of the cycle of consumption, finding true relationality in the discarded margins of society. Furthermore, this project addresses the gap in modern scholarship by analyzing Aldiss’ Supertoys Trilogy and putting it in comparison with the more modern and well studied Klara and the Sun.