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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Ishiguro’s engagement with AI, nature, and spirituality, showing how his work challenges received dichotomies between human and machine, natural and artificial, secular and sacred, offering instead a vision of interdependence shaped by vulnerability and transcendence.

Paper long abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction provides a rich lens for examining the entanglement of human identity, nature, and emergent technologies in the twenty-first century. While his novels are often situated in near-futures shaped by biotechnology and artificial intelligence, they remain deeply attuned to older traditions of meaning-making, particularly those tied to spirituality and our relationship with the natural world. In Klara and the Sun (2021), for example, Ishiguro stages encounters between an artificial friend and the sustaining force of sunlight, suggesting a quasi-religious ecology in which energy, environment, and machine consciousness interpenetrate. Such narratives point to a spirituality of nature that persists even amidst technological upheaval, foregrounding the sun, the landscape, and embodied vulnerability as sources of transcendence. This convergence complicates binary oppositions between the “artificial” and the “organic,” proposing instead that the rise of AI amplifies, rather than erases, our spiritual need to locate meaning beyond the human. Ishiguro’s work therefore challenges deterministic accounts of the AI revolution as either utopian or dystopian: it frames technology as a medium through which anxieties about mortality, kinship, and ecological fragility can be refracted. Reading Ishiguro through the prism of nature spirituality highlights how his speculative fictions function less as predictions of AI’s trajectory than as ethical meditations on interdependence. Ultimately, his narratives invite us to consider how the spiritual imagination might help reorient our collective response to artificial intelligence—ensuring that technological futures remain accountable to ecological balance, human vulnerability, and the transcendent significance of the natural world.