「经济学人」Hum

“Hum” evokes a techno-dystopia that feels eerily realistic

Hum. By Helen Phillips. Marysue Rucci Books; 272 pages; $27.99. Atlantic Books; £16.99

The most unnerving dystopian fiction is set in a future that feels imminent. In the unnamed but New York-like city of “Hum” the water tastes like chemicals, and the air feels hot and eye-stingingly polluted, made worse by the smoke billowing from distant fires. Digital devices are distractingly ubiquitous; they include bracelets that track the whereabouts of children and life-size “wooms” for personalised virtual-reality experiences. Many recently employed people are out of work, displaced by a new class of intelligent robots called “hums”.

This sounds bleak—and plausibly so. But Helen Phillips, an American novelist, understands that the most powerful stories of possible AI futures, from Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” to Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun”, are not really about what might happen, for better or worse, but about what it means to be human. “Hum” would not be as good as it is—and it is very good—if it were simply about the perniciousness of technology or people’s exploitation of the natural world. What makes this book riveting is how Ms Phillips uses an anxious, robot-filled setting with a warming climate to probe more prosaic anxieties about marriage and parenting.

May Webb has lost her job teaching communication skills to AI because the network can now teach itself. With opportunities scarce and her husband underemployed as a gig worker, she decides to earn money by submitting to a procedure at a well-funded startup that is trying to make faces “unlearnable” to omnipresent surveillance cameras.

Although her six-year-old son screams when he first sees her slightly altered face, the surgery allows May to splurge on a family trip to the botanical garden so that her children can experience green grass and clean water for the first time. Despite her noble intentions, May gets caught doing something in this walled oasis that prompts local officials to consider taking her children away. “Are you really an evil person just pretending to be a lovey mom?” her son asks.

As with her acclaimed novel “The Need” (2019), Ms Phillips uses short chapters and spare sentences to build an atmosphere of dread and queasy uncertainty. In a world that feels both familiar and not, her matter-of-fact prose makes the details more alarming. Subways advertise hologram dates with long-dead pop stars, and lawmakers push to ban the phrase “death camps” to protect citizens from dark thoughts about history and boost the “national happiness average”.

The main drama, however, is inside May’s head. She notices the distance she feels from her husband—how his texts seem suspiciously auto-generated, how the sight of his nakedness does “not activate her. It was a body.” She worries her children are seeing her flaws and rejecting her, that they are choosing to confide in their AI companions instead.

The fact that all this is happening amid robots drives home what is inescapable about the human condition. Ms Phillips makes it plain that no amount of technical ingenuity will alter the challenges of monogamy or alleviate the neurotic burdens of being a parent.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Head of darkness”(Sep 5th 2024)

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