Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Human Identity in Contemporary British Fiction: A Comparative Study of Klara and the Sun and Machines Like Me

This research reveals the contemporary British fiction crisis of human identity through a comparative reading of Kazoo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. Both novels view artificial intelligence as more than just a technology, instead, they treat it as a tool for subverting the human-machine divide. According to Adam, humans do not possess true moral agency, while Klara brings into question the nature of love, care, memory, and social recognition as essential qualities of personhood. By drawing upon the frameworks of critical posthumanism and AI ethics, we can find out that the novels are more concerned with whether human beings are capable of retaining a stable and exceptional identity when affect, consciousness, simulation, and ethical agency become entangled rather than on whether machines can be human. As comparison shows that artifice operates as a mirror through which contemporary fiction exhibits the ethical, emotional and ontological fragility of the human self.