Human Resources

We want them to look and act human
but not too real. Get it?
my boss said, touching the dip in a line graph—
the uncanny valley.

A creator of artificial intelligence for consumer goods, the speaker in Ryann Stevenson’s debut collection, Human Resources, resides in the uncanny valley of modern technological life, being human but finding life somehow unreal. Her sense of unreality is pervasive, deadpan, sometimes hilarious. As she declares in “Decision Tree,”

In the near future, at birth,

everyone will get a decision
tree. Its network of twiggy branches

connecting nodes to other branches
to other nodes—glowing spheres and rectangles

harnessing your choices, chances,
ends—will ensure a bespoke journey

of love, loss, and CoolSculpting®
non-invasive fat reduction. […]

With such curated, consumerist inanities—“the Face Eraser,” “the 30 Day Yoga Revolution”—the speaker’s alienation would be facile if not for some sharply depicted encounters: a male boss who tells her that (female) beauty is a “recognition of humanness,” a husband whom she catches staring at a beautiful Instagram model on his phone, a pregnant stranger who reminds her of her own biological clock: “An invisible mobile hangs / over each of our heads.”

The question that lingers here is an appropriately Rilkean one: if you are prosperous enough to care about “gold collagen full-face masks” and aware of the dire social consequences of technology, why not use your “human resources” to change your life? One of Stevenson’s resources may be creativity itself, as in “Replica,” where the horrifying idea of being replaced by AI becomes a metaphor for coming of age and learning to create meaning—“story”—in a world of kleptocratic capitalism:

Your replica begins as a galactic egg
you’ll need to educate about yourself
so it can grow up, become you, teach you
to be better. Eventually your egg
will no longer be an egg, but a story
of its interpretation of you.
The story will be sold by our business partners
to a government agency in Russia,
but that’s beside the point. […]