Did Klara and the Sun come true?
Partly here already. Companions sold to families for their children and chatbot copies of the dead are both real products, and the first humanoid house robots are on pre-order. But genetic 'lifting' has no credible path, the mass 'substitution' of professionals shows up so far only in young workers' hiring, and the machines we actually built are disembodied and talkative where Klara is embodied and quiet.
Read the review · 8.1/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story: 5 is the core premise, 1 is background detail. Arrived scores 1, arriving 0.5, everything else 0. P(n) is the weighted points divided by the total weight.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status | Value | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KLARA-1 | Families can buy AI companions marketed as friends for their children, sold as ordinary consumer products. Core premise: Klara is an Artificial Friend bought for a child; the novel is her story. |
5 | ARRIVED | 1 | 5 |
| KLARA-2 | Parents routinely pay to have their children genetically edited before birth to raise intelligence and academic performance, leaving unedited children at a clear disadvantage. Major: lifting causes Josie's illness and shuts Rick out, driving the plot. |
4 | FAR | 0 | 0 |
| KLARA-3 | Automation 'substitutes' large numbers of skilled professionals, such as engineers, so that losing one's career to a machine becomes a common middle-class experience. Texture: the father's substitution is glimpsed from the side as world-building. |
2 | ARRIVING | 0.5 | 1 |
| KLARA-4 | Companies will build an interactive AI copy of a specific person from their recordings and data, so that family members can go on talking to them after they die. Major: the Mother's plan for Klara to continue Josie is the novel's hidden engine. |
4 | ARRIVED | 1 | 4 |
| KLARA-5 | Humanoid robots live in ordinary family homes, moving around the house and doing domestic tasks on their own. Supporting: Klara's physical presence in the house is assumed; the story is about her mind. |
3 | ARRIVING | 0.5 | 1.5 |
| Total | 18 | 11.5 |
P(n) = 11.5 ÷ 18 = 64% · unweighted average 60%
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KLARA-1
Families can buy AI companions marketed as friends for their children, sold as ordinary consumer products.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: Klara is an Artificial Friend bought for a child; the novel is her story.
Talking plush toys built on large language models have been on sale since 2024, including in the US and UK, and companion chatbot apps are already widely used by teenagers. The form differs from Ishiguro's. Most companions are apps or voice boxes rather than bodies, they are cheap or free rather than rare, and they talk constantly. The market is also meeting resistance: a federal study by the FTC, wrongful-death lawsuits and Character.AI's withdrawal of open-ended chat for under-18s all suggest that companions for children will be more regulated than they are now. 1234
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KLARA-2
Parents routinely pay to have their children genetically edited before birth to raise intelligence and academic performance, leaving unedited children at a clear disadvantage.
Weight 4/5 · Major: lifting causes Josie's illness and shuts Rick out, driving the plot.
Only one case of heritable editing is known, He Jiankui's 2018 experiment to make children resistant to HIV, and it ended in a prison sentence. It targeted a single gene for disease, not intelligence. Intelligence is shaped by thousands of variants of tiny effect, and nobody knows how to edit for it safely. The nearest commercial practice is selecting IVF embryos on polygenic predictions of IQ, which is on sale in the US. Professional bodies judge it unproven, and the predicted gains are small. A venture-funded start-up is pursuing embryo editing to prevent disease, but heritable editing is banned in the US and most countries. Our date is the year a lifted elite could plausibly exist, not a forecast that one will. The range is very wide, and 'never' is a real possibility. 5678
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KLARA-3
Automation 'substitutes' large numbers of skilled professionals, such as engineers, so that losing one's career to a machine becomes a common middle-class experience.
Weight 2/5 · Texture: the father's substitution is glimpsed from the side as world-building.
The clearest signal so far is at the entry level. US payroll data show employment of 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed occupations falling well behind less-exposed peers, and there is suggestive evidence that hiring of young workers into exposed jobs has slowed. Aggregate studies from the US and Denmark still find no broad rise in unemployment and no effect on earnings or hours among experienced workers. Josie's father, an established engineer pushed out mid-career, is therefore not yet a typical case. The date is very uncertain because it depends on capability gains and on how firms adopt them, and the measures of exposure are themselves contested. 9101112
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KLARA-4
Companies will build an interactive AI copy of a specific person from their recordings and data, so that family members can go on talking to them after they die.
Weight 4/5 · Major: the Mother's plan for Klara to continue Josie is the novel's hidden engine.
Chatbots and video avatars of the dead are sold commercially. In China at least half a dozen firms offered them by 2023, and Western services such as Project December and HereAfter also exist. 2023 is a conservative date for arrival, not the first instance. The novel's version goes further: an embodied machine that has studied the living girl closely enough to take her place in the household. Nothing like that exists. Our confidence is medium because the chat-based form has clearly arrived, but whether these copies are good enough to 'continue' a person is doubtful, and ethicists are pressing for consent and age limits. 1314
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KLARA-5
Humanoid robots live in ordinary family homes, moving around the house and doing domestic tasks on their own.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: Klara's physical presence in the house is assumed; the story is about her mind.
Consumer humanoids are on pre-order. 1X sells NEO at $20,000 or $499 a month with US delivery promised for 2026, and Figure has unveiled a home-oriented Figure 03 with no sale date. As of this ledger's opening we have found no confirmed delivery to a customer's home. Early demonstrations relied on remote human operators wearing VR headsets, and the robot was slow. The bottleneck is reliable autonomous manipulation in messy homes, not the hardware. Our range runs from the first credible autonomous products to the point where such robots are unremarkable in better-off households. 15161718
- FOR Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions. Common Sense Media, 2025-07-16. A nationally representative US survey found that nearly three in four teens aged 13 to 17 had tried an AI companion and about half used one regularly.
- FOR AI toys are all the rage in China—and now they're appearing on shelves in the US too. MIT Technology Review, 2025-10-07. Reports that BubblePal sold 200,000 units after its 2024 launch and that FoloToy's AI plush toys are sold in more than ten countries, including the US and UK.
- CONTEXT FTC Launches Inquiry into AI Chatbots Acting as Companions. US Federal Trade Commission, 2025-09-11. 6(b) orders went to seven firms, including Alphabet, Character Technologies, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and xAI, asking about their companion chatbots' effects on children and teens.
- AGAINST Taking Bold Steps to Keep Teen Users Safe on Character.AI. Character.AI, 2025-10-29. A leading companion platform said it would end open-ended chat for users under 18 by 25 November 2025, a sign of retreat from child companionship under pressure.
- CONTEXT He Jiankui faces three years in prison for CRISPR babies. MIT Technology Review, 2019-12-30. A Shenzhen court jailed He for editing the CCR5 gene in embryos and confirmed that a third gene-edited child had been born. It is still the only known case of heritable editing.
- FOR Genetically Engineered Babies Are Banned. Tech Titans Are Trying to Make One Anyway.. The Wall Street Journal (republished by the Center for Genetics and Society), 2025-11-08. Preventive, a start-up backed by Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, is working towards a baby from an embryo edited to prevent hereditary disease, and is looking for jurisdictions that permit it.
- FOR Genetics testing startup Nucleus Genomics criticized for its embryo product: 'Makes me so nauseous'. TechCrunch, 2025-06-06. A consumer service lets IVF parents compare embryos on predicted IQ and other traits. This is selection rather than editing, but it is the commercial seed of 'lifting'.
- AGAINST ASRM Ethics and Practice Committees Release New Report Concluding Polygenic Embryo Screening Is Not Ready for Clinical Use. American Society for Reproductive Medicine, 2025-12-08. The US fertility profession says polygenic embryo screening should not be offered clinically and should be confined to research. This follows the ESHG's 2021 verdict that it is 'an unproven, unethical practice'.
- FOR Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford Digital Economy Lab, 2026-08-12. Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen (first version August 2025, revised 2026) find that employment of young workers in AI-exposed jobs is about 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers, but find no economy-wide displacement.
- CONTEXT Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence. Anthropic, 2026-03-05. Finds no systematic rise in unemployment in highly exposed occupations, alongside barely significant evidence of slower hiring of 22 to 25 year olds into them.
- AGAINST Evaluating the Impact of AI on the Labor Market: Current State of Affairs. The Budget Lab at Yale, 2025-10-01. Finds no discernible economy-wide disruption in the 33 months after ChatGPT's release, and says the pace of occupational change resembles earlier technology waves.
- AGAINST Still Waters, Rapid Currents: Early Labor Market Transformation under Generative AI. National Bureau of Economic Research (Working Paper 33777), 2025-05. Humlum and Vestergaard link Danish surveys to administrative records. The first version found precise null effects on earnings and hours, and the revised version argues that change is showing up in how work is organised first.
- FOR Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business. MIT Technology Review, 2024-05-07. Silicon Intelligence and Super Brain each report more than 1,000 clients for AI replicas of dead relatives, with prices falling to a few hundred dollars.
- AGAINST Call for safeguards to prevent unwanted ‘hauntings’ by AI chatbots of dead loved ones. University of Cambridge, 2024-05-09. Researchers at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence call the 'digital afterlife industry' high risk and propose consent, age limits and ways to retire deadbots. They name Project December and HereAfter as existing services.
- FOR NEO humanoid designed for household use, available for preorder. The Robot Report, 2025-10-30. 1X opened pre-orders at $20,000 or $499 a month, with first shipments to homes planned for 2026 and teleoperators available to guide chores the robot does not yet know.
- CONTEXT OpenAI-backed 1X opens California factory targeting 10,000 home humanoid robots in year one. TNW, 2026-05-01. The Hayward plant can make 10,000 units in its first year, but early units went to internal testing, with customer shipments still described as planned for 2026.
- AGAINST Humanoid Hype Meets Reality: 1X's $20K NEO Home Robot Draws Skepticism, Memes. Decrypt, 2025-10-29. Summarises the Wall Street Journal's hands-on test. Every demonstrated task was teleoperated by a human, and fetching a bottle from the fridge took over a minute.
- CONTEXT Introducing Figure 03. Figure AI, 2025-10-09. A third-generation humanoid explicitly designed 'for Helix, the home, and the world at scale', with no release date for home sale.
Ledger updated 1 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method