This interview was originally published on Audible.com.
Aaron Schwartz: Hey everyone, I'm Audible Editor Aaron Schwartz, and I'm here today with author Helen Phillips to talk about her new novel, Hum. Hum is a work of speculative fiction about a mother fighting to provide for her family and ensure their survival in the face of robots, artificial intelligence, and the crumbling ecosystem of a near-future dystopian world that is set on stripping people of all the things that make them human.
Helen is a winner of numerous awards and fellowships, such as the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Italo Calvino Prize in fabulist fiction. Her previous novel, The Need, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and she was a professor of mine in the MFA program at Brooklyn College, which she's also an alum. Thank you, Helen, for taking the time to speak with me.
Helen Phillips: It is so exciting to be back speaking with you, Aaron. Thank you so much for having me.
AS: Yeah, thank you. I wanted to start off talking about AI and robots. Given that this is a work of speculative fiction, the robots—or the hums, as they're called in the book, and where the book gets its title from—are of your own creation, but seem completely, scarily, almost like plausible inventions we could see in the near future. I was wondering what kind of research did you do into robotics and AI to get an idea of what was possible for these characters, or if that was even necessary at all?
HP: Yes. Well, actually, the research about AI was one of the great pleasures of the book for me. I would say that often when I set out to write a book, I often am starting from a place of exploring my own anxieties, maybe trying to understand them better and learn more, and find a way to process them to some degree. Super intelligent robots are really fascinating to me and really frightening to me, as I think they are for a lot of people. So, one of the earliest bits of research I did, and most significant bits of research related to AI and how I would evoke the characters of the hums, was the professor in this field, Arthur I. Miller, who wrote a book called The Artist in the Machine, which was published by MIT Press, gave a talk at Brooklyn College in 2019.
"Though the book is getting described as a dystopian novel, and I see where people are coming from, I feel in a way that it's almost irresponsible to write dystopias as our world gets ever closer to that."
He writes in that book, The Artist in the Machine, about a more positive version than “the robots are going to kill us all.” He writes of more positive human-AI collaborations in the realms of music and art. And certainly I'm not of the opinion that we should give all of our art making over to AI at all, but nor is he. It's really about the collaborative possibilities. So, when I was evoking the hums, I really wanted them to be both instruments of capitalism, but once you pay them to shut down their capitalist urges, they also can be very collaborative. So, in terms of their capacities, that's what I was thinking. And in terms of their physical bodies, I wanted them to look more like sculptures than like the typical android. So I tried to evoke that.
AS: It's funny you bring up AI and art, because immediately I was taken by the quote in the epilogue of the novel from the Swiss physician and chemist Paracelsus. I believe the quote is, "Poison is in everything and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy." I was curious, when talking about art and AI, what do you think that right dosage is? And do you think that there's ultimately like a net positive or negative?
HP: Well, that's a really deep question that I think a lot of artists and humans are grappling with right now. I will say that that quote was really important to me, "The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy," with all things related to technology right now. Technology obviously brings incredible benefits and potential connections to humanity, and it also brings a lot of dangers and possibilities for disconnection. And so I hope that the book is wandering in that gray area and that razor's edge of the positive and the negative possibilities of these technologies, including artificial intelligence. I, personally, as an artist, I have so much fun writing that I can't imagine ever giving up my one favorite activity I do as a human to artificial intelligence.
But I'm not opposed to the idea that there could be some really cool collaborations that could happen. At the same time, I just cherish so much making art, and it feels like the most human thing that one can do. And as a consumer of art, what I'm really interested in is some other human being crystallizing their experience in a way and sharing it with me. So, I don't know what it would be like to read the identical poem and it's either written by a human or a robot. Does it have a different effect on you? Even if the words are the same, I think that knowing where it's coming from would make a difference to me. But I think these lines will become blurrier and blurrier, and it's going to be interesting and fraught to see how we come out on the other side of this, if there is even another side.
AS: Yeah. I was thinking about, before this interview, how I still have, and I pulled it out of my notebook, I keep it in my notebook, the artist manifesto that you had us write in class.
HP: Are you serious?
AS: Yeah.
HP: That makes me so happy.
AS: For people listening, I was in Helen's speculative fiction class in the graduate program at Brooklyn College. And you had us write a manifesto. It could have been a list of things, whatever it was that was personal to us about the reasons why we make art and the things that inspire us. And you had us send it to you with an envelope with our address on it that you would then send to us two years later, and two years later, like clockwork, I got a piece of mail with my handwriting on it. I had forgotten about it, so it was jarring to get a piece of mail with my handwriting. And then I opened it up and saw what it was. It was a really moving thing, because I was in your course in spring of 2020, right when COVID hit and everything and the whole world kind of changed, and things were increasingly becoming less human in the way that we interacted with each other. So, to get a piece of mail two years later from that period of time that I wrote, it's an interesting thing to see what I was thinking at this point four years ago, and what was important to me then and what's still important to me.
In thinking about this novel and AI and things, and what you were just saying about the humanness of art, to me, this feels like a real, like, tactile object and an explanation as to how AI can't create everything. And these things, like our inspirations, our memories, are what make an artist who they are and why people connect with them. So, this felt like such a full-circle thing, interviewing you and then the whole story of this novel. I do really appreciate having this around all the time.
HP: That's really cool. I just sent them out for the two-years-ago class. I always wonder, I don't necessarily hear from people, I just know that they receive it in their mailbox. But I think that what you say is really meaningful to me, and it is something that I really tried to infuse in Hum, which is though the book is getting described as a dystopian novel, and I see where people are coming from, I feel in a way that it's almost irresponsible to write dystopias as our world gets ever closer to that. And so if we are going to be evoking a near future, is there any place to infuse some kind of hope in that situation? And the hope that, for me, I was trying to embed in the book, even though I acknowledge that it is quite a dark scenario that May and her family find themselves in, is those little tactile moments with your child, with your partner, in your own body, where you can just exist as a human. Those moments certainly during the pandemic became maybe more elusive for a lot of people. And as technology progresses, I worry that they become elusive. So, can it be a letter in your mailbox? Or just something that grounds you back to that physical reality of having a body in the world?
AS: I thought it was really special and cool the descriptions of nature in this botanic garden that's in the novel. The way you had written it, we could tell it was special to May because it was such a scarcity in their world. And if you look at books and movies for like the past 40, 50, even more years ago, it seems like this idea of robots and AI taking over our lives has been something we've thought about for a very long time. And for May, the protagonist, her kind of answer, her like hunger, is to feel real things and go to this botanic garden and get into nature. I'm curious how important it is for you, or how important it is for anybody, really, to maintain that relationship to the natural world, and if you have any sort of practice. Especially living in Brooklyn, it can be very hard to find a kind of peaceful greenery.
HP: Yes, I would say that some access to nature of some kind should be considered a basic human right. I think it's really important to our sense of self as creatures who evolved on this planet. I grew up in the mountains west of Denver, in a place where I could hike and explore nature a lot as a child. And yet I am raising my own family in New York City. So there's certainly a contrast there. But it also means that those green spaces that we do have in the city, I cherish so deeply. I live near Prospect Park, and also my more recent favorite is Greenwood Cemetery, where you can stroll for hours and maybe not see someone, and hang out with the dead, which is always interesting and compelling to me. My next book will actually have a lot more to do with Greenwood.
"This was a case where I had the title almost the very first thing. I knew the robots would be called hums, and I knew the book would be called Hum."
I would say via the botanical gardens, as it's called in the book, this sort of vacation land in the middle of the city where they can have access to the wilderness, was certainly based on the experience of going to those green places within a city and just how sacred they seem. But, indeed, the botanical gardens is complicated. It's not as straightforward as it seems at first. It has a bit of an underbelly. I think that part of what I'm trying to suggest with that is, as much as we all, or I might have the instinct to kind of run away from it all and bury my head in an apple orchard, we actually have to confront what's before us, as May has to in the book.
AS: Without giving anything away, I don't want to get too into what happens in the botanical gardens in the novel, but I was thinking about the book's title, Hum, which as I mentioned before is the name of these robots in this world. I was thinking about the word hum and how there's like this kind of almost new existential dread that's specific, I think, to this moment in time where we're so overwhelmed by all of the technology around us and the information coming at us that our brains are truly not wired to take in this much. We have very old hardware and we get like new software updates that we have to keep taking in every day.
HP: Yes. Yeah.
AS: And in the novel, all the advertising that the hums do—and we can have everything and we can FaceTime on the other side of the world to somebody, and yet we're still so anxious and sad, and to me, I've always kind of described that feeling as this low hum. That there's this kind of low frequency that I feel like is surrounding all of us. It's like hearing a noise that you just kind of can't shake. I just thought it was really interesting that the robots were named hums and the idea of the word hum and even just how that word sounds, it's like there's an ominous kind of sound to the word, and I was just wondering does any of that resonate with you and why you chose that word for this novel?
HP: Yes. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Everything you've said. So, there are a few things I would say about the title. One is that, yes, I think hum is a good word for this sort of anxiety-producing, low-frequency feeling of the internet always bubbling and technology always simmering. And this feeling of just this low hum that you can never totally shut down, you can never totally escape your phone, you can never have that perfect silence of the past. But there's a duality in the name, too, because I also think that hum is also, for me, it's a soothing word also. I like the way it sounds, and you hum to your child maybe when they're falling asleep. Hum is related to “om,” a sacred sound that, you know, you might make at the end of a yoga class.
So, hum to me really captures a duality, and that duality is very much what I wanted the book to be about. When I'm writing a book, sometimes the title comes really early on and sometimes it's a very hard one. And this was a case where I had the title almost the very first thing. I knew the robots would be called hums, and I knew the book would be called Hum.
AS: So, as I mentioned before, I was your student during COVID. And in the novel these characters have these virtual reality hubs that are called wooms, and everybody has their own and they interact with them. I couldn't help but think when I got to that part of the novel of how in the middle of our semester in the MFA program, COVID hit, and we went virtual. And it was a very strange thing because a graduate program like that is so community-oriented, and so much of it is about spending time with people and your instructors, just sitting around and talking and being in a room with one another. Then we couldn't do that anymore. And when we would do things like our Thursday night hangouts as a cohort after workshop, and then it would move to Zoom and it was just different. It just wasn't the same. I know you mentioned that conversation at Brooklyn College in 2019 about robotics and AI. So, kind of around that time, I was wondering if that experience of COVID and teaching online was at all a part of the impetus to write this novel?
HP: Yes. It's interesting. Though I had a lot of the concept in my mind before the pandemic, and I was already writing the book—I was about 50 pages in when the pandemic hit—I do feel like it is very informed by the fact that I wrote it, the first draft of it, and also into the second draft of it during that COVID time. I have two young children, so I couldn't even write a word for three months because they were being schooled from home online and I was teaching my classes. It was very frustrating in a way, the creation of the book got cut off by the pandemic. But then I think that when I began to have a little time to write, that experience of being isolated from other people made my character May's desire to connect more poignant in the book, or more maybe poignant in me, and therefore more poignant in May. This desire for physical proximity, to be connecting, to be making eye contact, to be enjoying the benefits of being in a physical body. I do think that that infused the book probably even in more ways than I realized.
There is another book related to this, Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle, that I was actually reading during that time when our class was remote. It's a nonfiction book about the ways that technology can weaken connection and ways that we can try to overcome that. So that book I would refer people to as also being very important to Hum and just to anyone alive right now.
AS: Oh, yeah. Great. One of my questions was going to be about recommendations. Since this is Audible, and we're talking audiobooks, I thought Ariel Blake, your narrator, did such a fantastic job. I was wondering what was important for you in looking for a narrator in this project?
HP: Well, it was really interesting because they sent me a few possible narrators and I spent a lot of time listening to the options. But from the first that I heard Ariel, I loved her voice so much. I loved it because I feel like her voice is calm and strong and has this note of compassion to it, while also being neutral. I just felt like it was the perfect voice for Hum. So, it's very exciting for me to hear my paragraphs, my words, in her voice. I absolutely love the work she did, and I'm very grateful to her.
AS: Yeah. I thought it was really interesting and well-done how she did such a good job of inhabiting the character of May and inhabiting the voices of human beings and the hums. I almost kind of forgot that they were two different voices, because one's so human, and then the other one is trying to be human. I thought she did an incredible job at doing both of those, for sure.
HP: I need to write her a thank you note. Actually, I've been meaning to do that [laughs]. I love her work.
AS: Yeah, that was fantastic. So, as I mentioned before, recommendations. Is there anything that you're currently reading or listening to that you would recommend to listeners?
HP: Well, I just read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which is such a beautiful and incredible work. I have also been listening to Go Tell It on the Mountain on Audible, which is a really well-done audiobook. So, in the Baldwin realm, those are two things that I've been really enjoying. In terms of books related to Hum, Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun was a great book that I read around the time I was working on Hum in terms of showing an embodied robot in action on the page. He handles that so poignantly and devastatingly, I think. I also love The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, which is a book about maternal anxiety and surveillance and robots and a mother who makes one mistake that causes her tremendous grief. That is a very powerful book.
"Friction is what makes us grow, friction is what enables us to become closer to other people."
Then in the realm of nonfiction, I've mentioned The Artist in the Machine by Arthur I. Miller, and I've mentioned Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle. I also loved and read while I was working on the book The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells in terms of the climate change aspects of the book. So, I could talk book recommendations for a long time, but those are some that spring to mind.
AS: Great. That's awesome. Klara and the Sun was such a phenomenal book. Is there anything else about Hum that you would want listeners to know before going into it?
HP: So, maybe one thing to talk a little bit about, the earliest seed of the idea for the book happened one evening I was walking home from teaching at Brooklyn College, and it crossed my mind that, "Oh, I need new dish rags." I hadn't bought dish rags in a while. It was a really idle, fleeting thought. And then when I got home, I opened my computer and dish rags were advertised to me. I think this is not an uncommon experience now, that you're like, "Wait, did I say anything about…? That was just in my head." And so that ubiquity of advertising is an uncanny feeling, but is it really harmful? It gives me an ick feeling. But in the book, I wanted to examine what would happen if that kind of surveillance—which is just selling me dish rags, whatever, I bought the dish rags, it's fine—but it seems like it has a potential darker side. So, in the book, I decided to put someone in an extreme situation where that kind of surveillance really did lead to bad things. So, the dish cloth seed was part of the beginning.
AS: Every time that happens to me, I always feel a little bit like I'm giving in. I know what you mean. It's just like, "No, I was going to go to a store and do it, but, okay. Okay."
HP: It's easy. There's this feeling, at one point in the book, the hum says to me, "Let me know if there's anything else I can do to remove the friction from your life." And that line is really important to me. That line, as I was writing, I had that line and I was wondering, "Where is this line going to go?" But that idea of these systems that remove all friction from our life. That's convenient and addictive, but it also concerns me when all the friction is gone.
There's also one other thing I'll note, which is that I interviewed a sociologist at Brooklyn College, Professor Ken Gould. And there's a line in there that's quoted in the end notes that he said, that the hum borrows in the book, which is, "We are all villains. The system only gives us villainous options." So wouldn't you buy the dish rags. You're kind of implicated. When I bought the dish rags, I was implicated.
AS: Yeah, that line went with the removing all friction. I've had this thought that everybody's trying to automate everything and make everything just be as quick as possible, as painless as possible, as uninvolved as possible, in everything. And everybody's just in a hurry. I always wonder if it's even a thought necessarily for most people as to what the purpose of automating everything is? Like, this is kind of what life is. It's about walking home and buying dish rags, you know?
HP: Yeah. Yeah.
AS: That if we remove those things from our lives, like doing laundry or going to the grocery store, there seems to be some sort of promise that on the other end of it is like peace, that you could finally just not do anything. But the thing that scares me about that is that that seems so much worse. I'd rather be inconvenienced by having to go to the grocery store, because what else am I going to do? I'm just an ape on the planet doing things, which we all are. I don't know why we seem less interested in doing things.
HP: And I think that one of the exciting things about interacting with other people is that other people provide friction. That's what's interesting about being close to someone, or being a parent, or being a teacher, or being a classmate. Someone will say something that rubs you the wrong way, that creates friction in you. That, to me, is powerful and beautiful. And the hums are really designed to actually create very little friction in their conversations with people in the book. Although, as time goes on, the hum changes a little bit in that regard, and that's an important arc of the book, but I will not reveal anything. But yes, I mean, I think that if we're talking about advanced cancer research where you can make a lot of progress by setting AI free on data, then that's a kind of thing where we should embrace it.
AS: Sure.
HP: But I do think there are times to embrace the friction of our lives and to facilitate friction rather than try to make everything totally frictionless. Friction is what makes us grow, friction is what enables us to become closer to other people. I really see May, actually, in the book seeking that friction and trying to use it in a productive way, even though she stumbles plenty.
AS: Well, thank you, Helen, for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it. And listeners, you can get Helen Phillips's novel Hum, available on Audible now.
HP: Thank you so much, Aaron. It was really fun and interesting to talk to you about Hum. And I really hope that Audible listeners enjoy Ariel Blake's gorgeous reading of my book. Thank you so much.
