With <i>Hum,</i> Helen Phillips Embraces the ‘Vast Gray Area’ of Modern Technology

The dish rags were disconcerting. In the fall of 2019, author Helen Phillips had already accumulated a hundred-plus-page document’s worth of anecdotes about AI and surveillance for a potential book she wanted to write, the book that would become last year’s Hum, now out in paperback. But it wasn’t until Phillips herself experienced the slow creep of data tracking that the concepts of her book started feeling routinely manifest. During one particular walk home from work, she’d realized she needed to buy new dish rags; she’d opened her computer shortly after, and there they were, advertised for her. “Had I ever searched for them? I didn’t remember,” Phillips tells me now. “Had I said something aloud? It was just that weird feeling of being surveilled.” She went ahead and bought the dish rags, but the purchase didn’t rid her of “that little ick feeling,” that sense of being watched.

“What if you took that kind of consumer surveillance to an extreme place?” Phillips asks. That question ended up forming the central premise of Hum, a taut work of literary science-fiction that’s as much about the insecurities of intimacy and parenthood as it is the expanding scope of technology. The story takes place in a climate-ravaged near-future world, in which Phillips’s protagonist, May, loses her job to the proliferation of AI, a proliferation that has led to the increasing presence of robots nicknamed “hums.” After undergoing an experimental surgery that prevents her face from being recognized by surveillance tech, May uses her earnings to take her husband and kids to the Botanical Garden, a lush and luxurious paradise protected from the climbing temperatures outside its fortress. But even a world inside an insulated bubble isn’t always a legible one, and soon May has to depend on a hum to keep her family intact.

Below, Phillips discusses how she tackled the big questions of technology, parenthood, and climate change in such a tight story; what working on Hum taught her about the future; and the common denominator amongst her books, including the 2019 National Book Award-longlisted The Need and 2015’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat.

Hum by Helen Phillips

The first line of the book came to me early on: “The needle inched closer to her eye, and she tried not to flinch.” There’s a bit of the anxiety of the future that we are facing right there in that line. May is interested in the possibility of not being recognizable in a city where surveillance is so common. She’s also doing it for money because she has lost her job to artificial intelligence. That’s what she has to sell at this point in her life: herself as a test subject.

There’s also a different answer to that question that’s a little more personal. When I was 11 years old, I lost all of my hair due to alopecia. So I’ve been a bald woman for the vast majority of my life. And when I was about 13, my mom and I had the idea to get eyebrows and eyeliner tattooed on my face so that I wouldn’t have to apply that in the morning. The process of having facial tattoos at that age—my sense memory of that is very present in [the book’s] initial scene. So that was where the physical grounding of it came from.

When I am setting out to write a novel, it is, in a large part, a way of processing my own anxieties—a way of understanding them better. I was assembling the things that I’m concerned about as I look to the future; there’s a long laundry list of those. And as I was reading and thinking about this plot, they all coalesced. The original draft of the book was twice as long and had a lot more research in it. I cut the book basically in half, because what I want is [the research] to be the iceberg that you feel under the book, but not the focus point of the book.

I certainly wanted to explore the vast gray area that I feel in my own life about technology.

It is actually encouraging or reassuring that you can know where your children are at all times. But, is it also troubling that we surveil our children by way of their devices? And always know where they are? Is there some loss of essential human exploration and adventure that they lose when they know that we’re tracking them? I’m concerned about that.

The hums are an embodiment of that [dissonance]. My hope is that the reader experiences the hums in a lot of different ways and have a range of different feelings toward them: from finding them sinister to finding them comforting and cute. I think that’s how technology is for us: It’s nice that when I’m lost, I can find my way on my phone. I don’t even know how I’d get around the world without it. But do I find it eerie that, in order for my phone to help me navigate a map, someone somewhere basically knows where I am at all times? It’s such a double-edged sword; I wanted to get at that in the book.

Since I began writing Hum, climate change has accelerated and artificial intelligence—when I was writing, it was GPT-3, not ChatGPT, which is a whole leap. So these problems have only become thornier since I began researching the book. But in the interviews I did as I was researching the book, I would ask people, “What can we do?” And a refrain I heard was that we have to have community; we have to have meaningful communities. It’s only from that sense of interconnectedness and collective action that we can hope to have change. The book doesn’t really get to that collective action place, but I do intend that, at the end—at least in the unit of the family—there’s some sense of an interconnected body of care and wellbeing.

I do feel like The Beautiful Bureaucrat, The Need, and Hum are kind of in a series together. They all have female protagonists, and they’re told in the close-third [point of view] with a real intimacy to that protagonist’s anxiety and desire. They all have some element of speculation or science fiction that, for me, is reflecting back on the world we do live in. They also all have a very different element of scientific research. With The Beautiful Bureaucrat, I did a lot of mathematical research. With The Need, I did a lot of research about paleobotany because that was the profession of the protagonist. For this book, I did a lot of research about artificial intelligence and climate change. But they’re speaking to each other in a deeper way, too. A reviewer recently said, “Helen makes anxiety a genre,” which is maybe a dubious distinction. But I do think that—to some extent—these are books about confronting your anxieties.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.