ABSTRACT
This chapter takes its lead from the posthuman inspiration of the previous one but, as the title indicates, concentrates on the human–machine continuum. It addresses the issue of artificial intelligence as embodied by humanoid robots by observing their relations with human characters. In these pages, attention is envisaged in its voluntary dimension, as associated with learning situations, these being so prominent in both Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me and People Like You (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). At the heart of this chapter resides the interplay between the emotional and the ethical that characterises both novels and is central to the pragmatics of attention that they develop.
