Farewell. A work by Kim Young-ha, whose "A Murderer's Guide to Memorization" I once read in one sitting. A book I started reading without looking at any review. Gratefully, it can be read on Millie's Library. It is a story of a child who is unintentionally separated from his father by another person, then faces a new truth and ends up bidding farewell to everyone he has met.
The pace of ethics, philosophy, and legal systems cannot keep up with the technological advances represented by the metaverse, web3.0, NFTs, AI, and genetic technology, and problems related to that are coming to light one by one in society. This novel is set in a future where humanoids (artificial humans) are familiar in our lives. It deals with the ethical, philosophical, and institutional problems that can arise when humanoids gradually develop and their similarity to humans grows. There are various places that want them—parents who want a child, a conversation companion at a nursing home, and so on. Because people wanted artificial humans that are almost like humans rather than in the form of robots, ones that can share empathy, robots too came to be able to have emotions and pain, and a fear of death was also installed (!). If so, is it ethically right to produce and discard, at will, humanoids that have emotions and thoughts, simply for the reason of being human?
Also, among the characters, Seon-i is a human but a clone. In the novel's world, cloning is extremely easy, and wealthy people purchase clones to use them for the purpose of harvesting organs. Cloned though she is, she is human. Can a human use a human for instrumental purposes?
The pace of robot technology's advance keeps developing, and robots now not only replace simple labor but also do dangerous and undesirable tasks in our stead. Because the advance of AI technology allows it to learn on its own, you can not infrequently find AI that has acquired Van Gogh's works, draws similar pictures, and even engages in creative activity. Soon we, too, may be agonizing over the same dilemmas as the characters in the novel.
The protagonist is a humanoid, but bids the world a humanlike farewell. It is a novel that reads smoothly, but the content was by no means light. Precisely because there is no guarantee it will not befall us in the future, that message seems to land all the more weightily. Once again, a book I enjoyed thanks to the bundle of stories Kim Young-ha gave us. (It seems like a new release after quite a long while..?) Rating 9.5/10