AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
A newly affluent couple has suffered loss - a miscarriage after years of trying to expand their family. The wife, Rebecca, is having a tough time recovering and being a stay-at-home mother to their only child, a daughter who has special needs. Then the husband's wealthy boss shares an exclusive and mysterious offer from a company owned by a South African technocrat. It's for a kind of personal assistant, one that knows everything about them but is totally under their control. But will it actually help? This is the plot of Gregg Hurwitz's book "The Delivery," and he joins us now. Welcome to the program.
GREGG HURWITZ: Thank you for having me on.
RASCOE: So what does it look like, and how does it work?
HURWITZ: It's a giant box, and the box is about the size of a casket, and this is something they've ordered, but they don't know precisely what it is. All they know is it's some mysterious new technology that will make their lives better. And like all technologies for all of us, it has to be invited in.
RASCOE: Is it kind of like a vampire thing with that? Like, you have to invite it in.
HURWITZ: That's exactly what it's like. I mean, I think about technology all the time. How many times are we uploading an app onto our phone and just sort of agreeing to the terms and conditions without reading them? And we have all these technologies in our phone that can read our biometrics and track us and market to us, and eventually they can almost start thinking our thoughts for us.
RASCOE: Well - and that's the thing. So this thing gets into the house. It takes a while to develop 'cause it has to know everything about them, and then all of a sudden, it's, like, this thing that pops out. How does the family feel about this guest at first?
HURWITZ: Well, at first, it's wonderful. It's a humanoid form. And it knows everything about them. It was partially even built from their DNA. At one point, they had to swab their cheeks and the cheek of their daughter, Maddy, and send this all off. So they have this thing that is plugged into their DNA. It's plugged into their buying system. It's plugged into their buying history. It's plugged into their internet and their viewing habits and their shopping habits. It knows everything about them. So it can anticipate all these things.
And Rebecca's this exhausted mom. She's still worn down with the heaviness of grief from this miscarriage, and she's just trying to keep up with making lunches and carpool and medical appointments. And this thing shows up, and it can make the perfect breakfast, and it can run chores, and it can tidy up the house. And then soon enough, it can start to put Maddy to bed. And so these luxuries start to happen, these conveniences. It starts to provide and provide and provide. But pretty soon, there's going to come a dark turn because, as with a lot of technologies, we have to be very careful what we wish for 'cause we might get it.
RASCOE: Well, Maddy, who - the daughter - she dubs the humanoid thing Mr. Man. At first, he's helpful, but he does lack nuance. He doesn't get the humor. And when he starts trying to take care of problems, including people, it doesn't end up the best way. Like, how did you come up with the idea for this?
HURWITZ: Well, I've been studying technology and AI for a long time. It's worked its way into my other novels, and it's played a lot of role of it (ph). I've started to be concerned about the ways that we are outsourcing our ethics and morality and responsibilities to technology.
And I remember reading a study one time, an AI simulation. They created sort of, like - you know, in a giant warehouse, they created, like, a box of a room in an office. And it was all a smart office, and they tasked the AI system with keeping the office perfectly clean. And so this was all simulated online. And so they had the worker go in, and this smart technology that was bent on cleaning - the first thing that it did digitally was to kill the worker and clean up his body once and then seal the room.
And so that's a perfect example of how you can meet an objective if you're a computer, if you're ones and zeros, that fulfills the objective of something that's asked of it, but it's devoid and detached from morality. And so these are some of the issues as we lurch forward that we're going to be contending with more and more, and I wanted to embody that in a story about a family and grief that's trying to put themselves back together.
RASCOE: Another part of this story - and what you said was just - it was really scary, so I (laughter) - sorry, I wanted to...
HURWITZ: All right, as a thriller writer, I aim to terrify. So...
RASCOE: Yes, yeah, you definitely did it with that. But the people outside of the family that are driving conflict in this story - the neighbor, the boss, the school moms - they are problems Mr. Man is built to solve or Mr. Man tries to solve. But in the story, we all see these characters, like, have moments where you see the softer side of them. Like, we see this part of them that makes us, I guess, maybe have more compassion on them. Do you think when we rely on technology, do we allow ourselves to be blinded to the humanity of others?
HURWITZ: There's no question. We all have, inside of us, garbage and gold. We all have darkness and light. And one of the things that happens when we outsource our thinking and our engagement to ones and zeros is we start to forget that. And I think we can see that now in the state that we're in, locked in endless partisan and cultural battles, where we come to view other people as - sort of as the friend-enemy distinction, which means everyone is either a friend or an enemy by definition within the tribe, and anything that the people who don't agree with us on something or anything - they have to be vilified and their positions have to be taken down and destroyed.
And this has been hastened by social media, which keeps feeding us all of those things that make us start to view ourselves tribally and view other people, other Americans, others in our community, as being a tribe who is opposed to us, who is evil and must be stopped and destroyed if we are to be on the right side of history. And we've lost a lot of the sophistication and nuance and give and take that comes from engagement with real people where we talk and we learn and, in doing so, we discover our own blind spots and our own willful blindness.
RASCOE: Well, I mean, in your private life, how much do you say no, or how much do you take charge? And, like, maybe do you pass on a smart refrigerator or refuse to engage with virtual assistants or AI searches? Like, what - like, how do you draw those lines?
HURWITZ: You know, I think about it all the time. You know, I don't have devices in my house as best as I can. But I don't have a device that I speak to that listens to everything that I do that meets my needs, but I do use AI. I mean, as a novelist, AI is the best personal assistant I've ever had in my life. The key is that we need to have it in its proper place, which is below us. It's a tool that needs to be below humans and humanity and human creativity and writing. It needs to serve us. We don't need to serve it.
RASCOE: That's Gregg Hurwitz. His new novella is called "The Delivery." Thank you so much for joining us.
HURWITZ: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
