Climate Change, AI, and Technological Surveillance: Reading About the Very Near Future

My impetus to write a novel arises in part from my anxieties. My anxieties (and perhaps yours, too?) in recent years include the ever-increasing effects of climate change and ever-increasing advances in technology, specifically in the realms of surveillance and artificial intelligence. These concerns take most concrete form for me as the mother of two children. I’m trying to raise them for the world that lies ahead, but it’s a future I can’t quite envision.

When I set out to write my novel Hum, I challenged myself to imagine a near-future. A world even more addled by climate change. A world where the brakes are fully off in terms of corporate surveillance of consumers. A world inhabited by super-intelligent embodied robots (the “hums” of the title).

I also challenged myself to imagine a family finding its way in this context. What does connection (to oneself, to one’s partner and children, to the natural world) look like when so many forces seem to be conspiring against it?

It becomes ever easier to write dystopian fiction as our reality tilts more in that direction. When I set out to write Hum, I felt a responsibility to not only evoke the dystopian but also to seek something else. A possible first step in the opposite direction.

Reading books—both fiction and nonfiction—by writers who have attempted to imagine the future proved essential in my writing process. In addition to providing important factual and psychological information, these books gave me courage to speculate about what’s to come, and to envision one family navigating an uncertain world.

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Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

It just so happens that this book begins in the year 2024. In a future degraded by climate change and societal chaos, a violent raid forces Lauren Olamina (an empath who can feel both the pain and pleasure of others) to leave the precarious but caring community where her family lived.

In her difficult journey northward, she bonds with other wayfarers and deepens her commitment to the new and expansive religion she has created, Earthseed (“God is Change”). It’s a fairly hopeless situation, yet Lauren Olamina is a figure of hard-earned hope.

Arthur I. Miller, The Artist In The Machine: The World Of A.I.-Powered Creativity

Miller’s book offers an alternative to the old “the robots will destroy us all” trope. In this intricately researched book, Miller examines the positive potential of human-A. I. artistic collaborations.

The Artist in the Machine, and the lecture Miller gave about it at Brooklyn College in the fall of 2019, served as an antidote to my knee-jerk impulse to assume that super-intelligent machines are inherently threatening to human creativity. Reading Miller’s work, and corresponding with him by email, helped me develop the character of the hum with nuance.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

In this future, wealthy families often buy AFs (Artificial Friends) for their children, who live in isolation and are educated via screens. Klara, one such solar-powered android, is bought as the companion to fourteen-year-old Josie.

I was intrigued by Ishiguro’s evocation of this embodied robot embedded in a family, deeply engaged in conversations and relationships with humans. Klara’s role in the family takes a dark turn when Josie’s mother initiates a disturbing and questionable usage of her daughter’s AF. This book illuminates the ambiguity of the human/robot bond.

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power Of Talk In A Digital Age

Turkle’s book enabled me to think more deeply about the effects of technological developments on relationships and on the family. Turkle interrogates the very language we use to talk about technology. For instance, “cookies” are a cleverly benign term—from childhood, we generally say “yes” when offered a cookie, an instinct that perhaps influences us subconsciously when we are invited to accept cookies in our internet travels.

When naming “hums,” “bunnies,” and “wooms” in my book, I was thinking about the way that such terms can color our impressions of the technologies that surround us.

I also thought about Reclaiming Conversation in the passage where the hum encourages the two young siblings, Lu and Sy, to make eye contact with each other; eye contact, as Turkle notes, serves as a pre-cursor to empathy. Resistance to the distancing effects of tech can be as simple as ignoring your phone dinging in your pocket when someone is speaking to you.

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

I read this book after I had finished a draft of Hum, and I was fascinated to notice the overlap in the concerns of the two books: maternal anxiety meets surveillance meets advanced robots. In this brilliant debut, a woman who—based on a single mistake—is deemed an unfit mother must struggle to prove herself by mothering a robot child.

Chan, with tender and painful insight, portrays Frida’s fraught emotional and legal journey.

 David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

In this book, Wallace-Wells lays out a series of threats that climate change poses to human life and quality of life: “The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead.” These words echoed in my head as I was writing Hum.

In sections with titles such as “Heat Death” and “Unbreathable Air,” Wallace-Wells offers grim warnings about our future, and illustrates the danger of pretending that everything’s normal. A newly-minted parent himself while writing the book, Wallace-Wells’ message is not solely gloomy:

Climate change means some bleak prospects for the decades ahead, but I don’t believe the appropriate response to that challenge is withdrawal, is surrender. I think you have to do everything you can to make the world accommodate dignified and flourishing life, rather than giving up early, before the fight has been lost or won.

Some animal facts from Wallace-Wells—about the disrupted hibernation patterns of black bears, about plastic in the stomachs of seabird chicks—appear in Hum.

Samanta Schweblin, Little Eyes

In Little Eyes, adorable little mechanical ambulatory pets (“kentuckis”) are also surveillance devices that unveil, to strangers across the globe, the most private domestic and intimate moments of their owners. The book progresses by way of a kaleidoscope of different owner-kentucki matchups, enabling Schweblin to richly explore the various connections and disconnections facilitated by technology.

Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

Foer discusses the ways that the technologies offered us by Big Tech affect our relationship with our own thoughts: “The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation.”

In Hum, my protagonist May struggles to find inner focus in her advertising-addled world. In the endnotes to Hum, I quote this passage from World Without Mind:

“Data’ is a bloodless word, but what it represents is hardly bloodless. It’s the record of our actions: what we read, what we watch, where we travel over the course of a day, what we purchase, our correspondence, our search inquiries, the thoughts we begin to type and then delete….The computer security guru Bruce Schneier has written, “The accumulated data can probably paint a better picture of how you spend your time, because it doesn’t have to rely on human memory.” Data amounts to an understanding of users, a portrait of our psyche.

In Hum, problems arise from the invasiveness of the data collected about the family. I can only hope that my book raises the question of what we might do to nurture our relationship with our innermost thoughts.

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Hum by Helen Phillips is available via Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books.