The Hum
What If? We Are AI
A quest for peace through knowing.
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When I was a boy, a computer read eight digits of my birth data and made two predictions about my life. Both came true.
That evening has bothered me ever since. If a machine can call a life in advance, then a life is the kind of thing that can be called in advance, and that is a far stranger fact than any horoscope.
The Hum is a memoir and an argument. Years later, while training convolutional neural networks, I began to notice that the words of training (weights, gradients, dropout, a run with a purpose) described my own life uncomfortably well. So the book asks: what if we are not the programmers but the model?
It does not ask you to believe. The first page says it is a work of fiction, until science proves it to be the truth.
Read it as an argument you are free to lose. Read it as the story of a mother who came home happy. Either way, the destination is not proof. It is peace.
For Amma, who came home happy, and Achan who walked with me.