Reframing Socio-Cultural Malaise in the Technocene: A psychosocial reading of Abe Kōbō’s Inter Ice Age 4 and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

This essay explores the role of emotionally intelligent machines in affecting human identity and social bonds through a psychosocial reading of Abe Kōbō’s Inter Ice Age 4 (1959) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). Despite decades of technological progress between the publication of the two works, both novels deal with alienation and loneliness in dystopian paradigms by portraying artificial intelligence (AI) as a solution. While the machines are expected to meet the emotional needs of humans, Inter Ice Age 4 employs AI to destabilize the Soviet Union’s political power during the Cold War and change the future of humanity; Klara and the Sun epitomizes the social isolation provoked by the dominance of virtual life, augmented reality, and AI surrogates. After an initial interdisciplinary framing of the psychosocial perspective on AI, this essay discusses how the two novels reframe the socio-cultural malaise of the “emotional technologies,” thus denouncing the individual alienation and the identity crisis raging in contemporary times, assessing anthropo-technological progress in human-machine interaction as a symptom of present insecurity.