英文摘要 |
In his Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (2019), the cardiologist Eric Topol proposes that with the three Ds-democratization, digitization, and deep learning-healthcare practitioners can significantly improve their service and revolutionize healthcare systems. With the advancement of artificial intelligence or AI, technology, the application of AI in healthcare provokes continuing debates, with medical professionals divided between fear of displacement by the use of AI and enthusiastic embrace of the latest technological innovations. Starting with an overview of the interactions between AI and healthcare as well as the representations of AI in the science fiction genre, this paper analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) from the perspective of the application of AI in medicine. It argues that with empathetic interaction with the human characters in the novel, the AI protagonist Klara enacts a special kind of deep medicine. It is Klara, the AF, or artificial friend, who can truly understand the depth of human loneliness and offer her deep empathy, thereby provide a certain kind of cure for the dystopic fictional universe. The message coming from Ishiguro, through Klara, is the importance of human interconnection and interconnectedness, which can also be regarded as Ishiguro's response to the COVID-induced social distancing and isolation. |