"Hum," Helen Phillips's third novel, begins with a needle being drawn, steadily and irreversibly, across a woman named May's face. She is participating in a paid experiment in "adversarial tech," undergoing a procedure that will ever so slightly alter her features, making her harder for surveillance cameras to identify. As the book opens, May is mid-op, the needle advancing its "slender and relentless line of penetration" across her temple, toward the skin of her eyelid. What lies on the other side of the surgery? "Some sort of transformation, undeniable but undetectable," Phillips writes.

Some believe that it is the future in problem-solving and the optimizer of existing solutions. The pioneer in discovering ideas we as humans would have never dreamed of. But it is also extremely disruptive -- changing the momentum in various industries and presenting to us new factors to take into consideration. We constantly worry about how AI may terminate our species, becoming the almighty ruler that decides not to obey our instructions. It would be foolish to not acknowledge that there are certain aspects of AI we should be concerned about.

Until we can design a mind that's superhuman and flawless, we'll have to settle for instilling plain old human values into artificial intelligence. But how to do this in a world where values are constantly evolving? Many of our life choices today would be considered immoral by people in the Middle Ages -- or even the 1970s, says Ben Goertzel, whose family personally experienced the sad state of LGBTQ acceptance in Southern New Jersey 50 years ago. Raising an A.I. is a lot like raising kids, says Goertzel. Kids don't learn best from a list of rules, but from lived experience – watching and imitating their parents. A.I.s and humans will have to play and learn side by side, and evolve together as values adapt toward an increasingly technological future.