Helen Phillips on the Effects of Technology and AI on Our Most Intimate Bonds

Helen Phillips’s new novel, Hum, takes place in a world populated by intelligent robots called “hums.” In this work of speculative fiction, Philips explores a near future stemming out of our world’s obsession with technology and artificial intelligence.

At the same time, though, this is a story about family, as May, a wife and mother, loses her job to AI and seeks out desperate measures to take care of herself and her family.

Underneath this dystopian story is one of a mother longing for connection and a family that is both close and so distant from one another all at once. I sped through this novel, drawn in by the characters as well as the sense of intrigue in this world not so different from our own. Phillips builds a sense of tension and quiet discomfort, keeping me gripped from start to finish.

Deena ElGenaidi: While this book is about a future society where AI is everywhere and everyone is under constant surveillance, the story is also very much about family, marriage, and motherhood. Why did you choose to show this dystopian future through a family story?

Helen Phillips: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m glad you pulled out the point that the setting aside, it really is about a family and about connections within a family, because I do find that to be the focal point.

I guess the reason to put that in a dystopian setting is that as we look ahead to the future at some of the things that will be wrought by technology and climate change, I feel like family is a little bit unexplored. What effect will this have on the family? What effect will this have on our most intimate bonds? That is one of the most pressing questions, certainly for someone raising children now and also for anyone trying to have close intimate relationships of any sort. So that was something I really wanted to explore. How do these technologies and changes in our world impact us at that most profound level of intimate connection?

DE: In the end notes of the book, you have a really comprehensive list of all the research you’d done and all the articles you’d read paired with specific scenes. When doing your research, did you already have an idea for the book in mind or did the idea develop out of these pieces you read? And how did the research end up informing the story and plot?

HP: It’s such an intricate braid that it’s almost impossible to answer that question. The way I started the book was, a line would come to me, or an image or a plot idea. And then I might see a headline like “There’s been a 30% decline in the bird population in North America in the last half century.” That headline would be in my notes.

So the book began as a hundred page list of things from my own mind, overheard lines, newspaper headlines, and things that were happening in our world. I had the plot to some extent. I knew that there would be this one remaining green area that was very valued in the middle of this city. So that setting was present for me. This idea of a woman who had lost her job to artificial intelligence and needed to do something extreme to make money for her family came pretty early on. But it was also a lot of braiding those ideas together with the reading I was doing. 

I know Margaret Atwood said of The Handmaid’s Tale that nothing that happens in the book hasn’t happened in some form somewhere. That quote has always been really interesting to me as someone who writes speculative fiction. This is not set in our world, yet I did draw from a lot of things that are happening in our world as I was crafting the landscape of the story.

DE: That’s such an interesting process.

HP: It’s very slow. It’s really not efficient. There’s so much research I did that doesn’t even appear in the book whatsoever. I mean, the original draft was twice as long as the final draft. But I didn’t want it to be a didactic book, so I ended up pulling back on a lot of the stuff that I had originally put in that was more connected to the research.

DE: I want to talk about the beginning of the book. It has such an eerie start. The main character, May, is literally selling her face. I thought that was fascinating. How did you come up with that idea?

HP: There are two answers to that. One is that she loses her job to artificial intelligence, and as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and is able to do more things, I have a very real concern about what people will do to make money. She has to turn to this really extreme way of making money. 

On a much more personal note, I have the autoimmune condition alopecia, so I’m bald. I lost all of my hair at age 11 due to this condition, and when I was around 13, I made the decision with my mother that I would have eyebrows tattooed onto my face because I had lost all of my eyebrows, and a face likes eyebrows. So I had a tattoo artist put eyebrows on my face, and I think the numbing gels have come a long way since then, but it was a really intense experience of just having needles right up in my eyes. The sensory experience of that first scene is actually drawn from a procedure that I had.

DE: Oh wow, that’s so interesting. Also in this book, the characters are always being watched. They live in a surveillance state, and the hums can immediately pull up footage of what everyone is doing all the time, which eventually leads to May’s downfall. At the same time, May and the characters enable and participate in that surveillance whenever it’s convenient for them. May is tracking her family’s location. She goes into her husband’s woom to see what he’s been watching or searching. What message is this book giving about our own complicity in surveillance culture?

HP: You’ve asked the question that is so much the heart of the book—just this gray area of technology. It’s really hard not to be a hypocrite in the system that we live in. Like I’m concerned about the impact of a company like Amazon on our world, but I do order things on Amazon when it’s some random thing that I need quickly. And I’m embarrassed to admit that, but I do, and a lot of us do. 

This question explains everything about my book. I mean, that is the question of the book. How do we deal with the fact that we have been complicit in our own surveillance in a way that is more than what the government ever could have accomplished, because of the amount of information that we share about ourselves through social media and through the Internet and through our shopping habits?

At the same time, consumers don’t have a government or corporate system that is protecting them from this surveillance, either. So I don’t blame us. We’re in a system that operates this way, and the book is intended to be an exploration of the times when we are uncomfortable with the technology that is tracking us and those times when we allow it to happen. 

DE: The hums are also so eerie and sinister. Is there anything that inspired you to come up with them, or any other speculative fiction or dystopian stories you were thinking of?

HP: It’s interesting that you describe them as eerie and sinister because I hope that they walk a little bit of a line—that they are eerie and sinister, but also kind of appealing and friendly. I think that sometimes our technologies are.

For instance, there’s an example I read in a book called Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle. In it, she talks about the term “cookies,” which is such a friendly term. From the earliest age of childhood, if someone says “Do you want to cookie?” you’re kind of primed to say yes. So these things that we encounter as we travel around the Internet are cookies, and we say yes to them, and maybe that’s partly because they have such a cute name. Technologies that are cute and charming are kind of frightening because they become more insidious.

Maybe part of what you find sinister and eerie about the hums is the fact that they are friendly. They have calm and soothing voices. They are concerned with removing friction from our lives. I think that’s part of what makes them eerie.

At the same time, and I will avoid spoilers here, I do want the characters of the hum to have a little more nuance than that. There are hopefully moments where the reader can like the hum or feel fond of the hum or not only be scared of the hum but also think that the hum has something wise to offer.

I did also do a lot of research about artificial intelligence when I was writing the book, and one book that was helpful just in terms of the scope of the history of artificial intelligence is a book by Clifford A. Pickover called Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History. I also read another book called The Artist in the Machine by Arthur I. Miller, and it’s about human-AI creative collaborations and takes a much more positive view of that than I think a lot of us tend to, or at least than I tend to.

So those things are both helpful for me in thinking about what the hums looked like and in trying to develop them, almost to refer back to your last question, as existing in this gray area where they’re eerie and frightening.

DE: Yeah, for sure what you were saying about the friendliness of the hums, I think is what made them eerie for me.

HP: Yeah, that’s almost scarier than a robot that looks like a warrior. A sort of friendly, cute robot has an easier time getting into our lives in an insidious way.

DE: What would you say May represents or the family as a whole represents? Is she the template for the average American, and is this the template for the average American family?

HP: Well, I’m always concerned by the word average because we live in such a complex world that what average is, really depends on who you’re talking to. With May and her family, it was more just this question of, how does one family and one woman navigate the challenges of this world of dizzying technological advancement and climate change?

She just wants the things that I think are very common for people to want. She wants to be able to love and care for and provide for her family, and those things are becoming ever harder to do and ever more complicated to achieve. I don’t know if that makes for average or not, but I wasn’t really thinking of averages, more of one specific woman navigating a situation that a lot of people are navigating a version of.

DE: Would you say that the book can serve as a warning to our current society?

HP: I mean, is it a cautionary tale? Perhaps. Yes, I think it is in part a cautionary tale. May exists in a world that bends towards disconnection. A lot of things are conspiring towards disconnection, and she is seeking connection. She’s really trying hard, and she’s stumbling a lot. She wants to connect with her children. She wants to connect with her partner. She wants to connect with nature. She wants to connect with herself, and the world she exists in makes it really hard for her to do that. But I do think she tries hard, and I hope that there are at least glimmers of her finding ways to do that even amid her circumstances.

DE: Yeah, absolutely.

HP: You know, I think that it becomes easier to write dystopian fiction as things maybe bend more in that direction. I did feel almost a responsibility to not only write the dystopian but hopefully include other elements of possible paths.

DE: This next question is purely for my own curiosity because I couldn’t get this scene out of my head. There’s a moment when May pulls out a box of raisins, and it’s filled with insects. But then she keeps the box of raisins. Why?

HP: Oh my god, that’s so funny. Two of my best friends who read the book had the same question. What I intend with that—and this is definitely operating on a thematic level—May finds something in this packaged place that is organic, that is biological, that indicates that even in our over packaged world, biological life can survive and thrive.

She looks at these insects, and obviously it would be absolutely repugnant to find something like this, but she is sort of like, oh they’re surviving. And so she doesn’t throw them away. But maybe it’s too weird.

DE: I loved the scene, but then I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

HP: Yeah, she keeps it on the counter, and then she’s like “Don’t eat those,” but she doesn’t actually get rid of it. Maybe after the end of the book she’s going to deal with what’s in the box, but in that first moment I think she almost has a respect for all the biological life that’s thriving amid the plastic. She too wants to be able to have a biological life that’s thriving amid all of this.

The post Helen Phillips on the Effects of Technology and AI on Our Most Intimate Bonds appeared first on Electric Literature.