Helen Phillips' new book explores what makes us human in a world run by AI
The American writer discussed Hum on Bookends with Mattea Roach
When American writer Helen Phillips begins a new project, she dives into research surrounding topics that she's anxious about.
"My anxieties are my inspiration: coming to understand those anxieties more deeply, confronting them, maybe finding some sort of resolution," she said in an interview on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
"For me, the process of confronting the anxieties is learning more about the things that I'm worried about."
In writing her latest book, Hum, she faces fears about artificial intelligence and climate change.
Hum is a speculative fiction novel about May, a mother in the near future, who's struggling to provide for her family in a world that's gripped by climate change and overrun by technology. When she's presented with a solution, to be a guinea pig in a new face-altering surgery for a big payday, she goes for it. But the reward comes at a steep price — and she'll have to trust technology to save her family.
Phillips is the Brooklyn-based author of six books including novel The Need, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and short story collection Some Possible Solutions, which won the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. A professor at Brooklyn College, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
Phillips joined Roach on Bookends to chat about her complicated relationship with technology, processing her anxiety through writing and finding hope.
Mattea Roach: Anxiety is this animating force not just in Hum, but also in your previous works. Why do you think you're drawn to writing as a way of processing these anxieties that you might have about various things going on in the world?
Helen Phillips: I think that has something to do with my childhood. So when I was 11 years old, I lost all of my hair due to the autoimmune condition alopecia. Even before that happened, I was already a really passionate reader and writer. But especially in that time in my life, writing provided just a space of freedom to grapple with this reality of being a bald pre-teenager in our society, which had plenty of challenges.
When I was 13 years old, I set myself the New Year's resolution to write a poem every day and I kept that resolution for the next eight years and wrote a lot of poetry. So writing for me is a place and has for many, many, many years, where I take what I'm anxious about and what I'm struggling with and try to give language to it because when I give language to it, then it transforms into something that I can share with someone else.
When I give language to it, then it transforms into something that I can share with someone else.- Helen Phillips
When I share it with someone else, it's no longer a burden that I'm carrying alone. Hopefully my readers don't mind sharing the burden with me, or at least maybe see some reflection of their own anxiety in my work.
MR: I want to get right into the story, which opens with your main character, May, and we meet her in an operating room where she's agreed to have this experimental face-altering surgery, but her family really doesn't want her to do it. What brought her to this place?
HP: She lost her job because she was replaced by artificial intelligence, and in fact, it was artificial intelligence that she helped to train. She's been having a really hard time finding a job since in this world, just a little in the future, a lot of jobs have been lost to automation.
She believes this surgery, even though it's a disturbing surgery — it's going to subtly modify the 68 points of her face — so that she can't be recognized by surveillance, but she's driven really by desperation and need for money and also for hope and slightly better opportunities for her family.
MR: Your novel explores a lot of the concerns that people have about artificial intelligence and automation through this one intelligent robot called a hum. We first see that robot because it's performing May's surgery. But they're everywhere in this world. How did you want readers to feel about the hums in the novel?
HP: I hope that as the reader is reading, you're wondering, "Wait, how much is the hum understanding? How much consciousness or awareness does the hum have?" I hope that the reader has a very complicated relationship with the hum, much as I have, say, a complicated relationship with my own cell phone.
You're fascinated by it. You're terrified of it. You think it's cute and helpful. You find it sinister. All of these things should be part of the relationship that the reader has to the hum and, certainly, that May has to the hum.
I was very excited when I came up with the name hums for the robots in the book because I felt that that name captures a duality that was really important to me and the characterization of the hums. So on the one hand, we think of this low simmering hum of all of our digital devices, the simmering hum of the Internet. It's sort of like almost a maddening sound that you can never turn off.
But on the other hand, humming is a way that we use our bodies to make music. You hum to yourself while you're doing the dishes. You hum a lullaby perhaps to a child as they're going to sleep — and it's connected to the sacred sound om. So hum contains for me all of that duality and I really wanted that to be present in the character of the hum.
MR: Is there anything in particular that makes you feel hopeful about the future of tech and the future of our relationship with technology as humans?
HP: Well, one thing that I came across in my research for the book was I conducted several interviews and I would begin the interviews by asking, "What are you worried about?" and depending on the person's field, whether that was sociology or studying supply chains or making renewable fabrics, the person would have some different answer. But then when I would ask at the end, "What makes you hopeful?" — they all had the same answer and it was collective action.
Maybe that sounds like an oversimplistic answer, but it was really interesting to me that that was true across my interviews that collective action is the way to make things happen. It's hard to know all the time what that means or how to implement that. But it did give me a certain feeling of hope that there was some agreement about that at least.
We need to tune into one another and tap into one another as a first step.- Helen Phillips
One of the first steps to collective action is to be attuned and connected to the people around us and to try to understand what is on their mind, what are they worried about, what are they thinking about? So we need to tune into one another and tap into one another as a first step.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.
