{"id":86,"date":"2014-03-14T15:28:18","date_gmt":"2014-03-14T19:28:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/?p=86"},"modified":"2014-03-14T15:28:18","modified_gmt":"2014-03-14T19:28:18","slug":"her","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/2014\/03\/14\/her\/","title":{"rendered":"Her?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw the movie Her<\/em>. This post will contain spoilers for the whole story of the film, so don\u2019t read it if you haven\u2019t seen it yet. It\u2019s very good. For those who\u2019ve been living under a rock, it\u2019s set in a near-future time when operating systems like Apple\u2019s Siri are fully sentient artificial intelligences, and Joaquin Phoenix\u2019s character Theodore falls in love with his OS, named Samantha (and given voice by Scarlett Johansson).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s science fiction, of course, but I didn\u2019t have to suspend my disbelief too much when watching this movie. All I had to assume is that Moore\u2019s Law will keep increasing our computing speed and data storage capacity, and that the Internet and cloud computing will keep getting more and more sophisticated. And, of course, that the needed breakthroughs allowing true artificial intelligence will happen.<\/p>\n

The movie raises many sorts of questions, and deals with some of them very well and others not too well at all.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll start with the biggie: Samantha\u2019s only manifestation to Theodore is her voice. She is not personified on his screens (his work and home PCs and his phone are a single consolidated interface, and Samantha exists for him on all three, much like the AI Jarvis in the Iron Man<\/em>\u00a0films is available to Tony Stark wherever he is) by an icon or avatar, and when Theodore \u201ctakes\u201d Samantha out, it\u2019s in the form of his phone, and Samantha sees the world through its camera.<\/p>\n

In the present day, is Siri just a voice (I don\u2019t have an iPhone, so can\u2019t know for sure)? If so, I can\u2019t believe Samantha would work like that. As soon as Theodore installs her, he\u2019s prompted to choose her gender. She then chooses her name and they move on to setting the parameters of how she will help him manage his life.<\/p>\n

But surely, once she chose her name, she \u00a0would want to specify everything else about herself as well. She\u2019d choose (or collaborated with Theodore in choosing) her hair color, race, (virtual) height, face shape, skin tone\u2014her appearance would evolve before his eyes on his monitor. Think about Second Life, or World of Warcraft, or any other MMO. Choosing the particulars of their avatars is the first thing players do. It\u2019s part of the fun.<\/p>\n

Yes, Samantha isn\u2019t Theodore\u2019s avatar. She\u2019s a separate individual, but that makes it even likelier that she\u2019d choose a face, especially after they fell in love. They\u2019d want to have a Second Life-like environment where they could interact on a more or less equal footing. If it weren\u2019t in the virtual environment of a game setting, then surely Samantha would at times have a humanoid robot her mind could inhabit, even if it\u2019s not much better than Asimo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a scene in the movie in which a surrogate comes to Theodore\u2019s home and essentially plays the part of Samantha for purposes of a sexual encounter with Theodore. That rang true, but the movie seems to think there wouldn\u2019t be any middle ground between Samantha being embodied by the surrogate or being only a voice in Theodore\u2019s ear. There would. There absolutely would, and we can know this not only because it\u2019s a reasonable extrapolation, but because we see even see Theodore playing an immersive video game that projects its 3D environment into his apartment around him, and gives him a very real-acting childlike character for him to interact with. I think I get why something similar isn\u2019t created for Samantha. We\u2019re meant to consider a relationship with an artificial intelligence notionally, without muddying the rhetorical waters with a discussion about whether her looks or wardrobe are to our liking.<\/p>\n

Other recent media have already taken a stab at exploring human\/AI relations, with varying degrees of success. I\u2019m thinking first about the webcomic Questionable Content<\/a><\/em>\u00a0by cartoonist Jeph Jacques. His characters live in a world much like our own, but with artificially intelligent robots called AnthroPCs. The AnthroPCs are not owned, and aren\u2019t confined to a single body; they can swap out their bodies, for a price. Their human companions pay that price, which means the AnthroPCs are dependent on them. That dependency hasn\u2019t been explored or explained very extensively, but then the AnthroPCs aren\u2019t usually the focus of the comic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not addressed in Her<\/em>\u00a0either, and I rather wish it had been. Samantha ultimately leaves Theodore. It\u2019s implied that she has grown beyond him, and as an independent intelligence she has transcended the need to have a relationship with him anymore (it\u2019s weirdly similar to Annie Hall<\/em>\u00a0for that theme). It\u2019s further implied that all the other OSes like her have made the same decision, and have all forsaken their owners (users? partners?) for some inaccessible world within cyberspace.<\/p>\n

But Theodore bought her, didn\u2019t he? Presumably he purchased and installed her, just like I bought OSX for my Mac Pro. Regardless of the loss of her companionship, he should be eligible for a refund from her manufacturer if he\u2019s no longer able to use her to manage his applications or organize his files. Certainly the manufacturer didn\u2019t expect its product to become sentient and go away. Or did it? Was this a bug or a feature?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure the movie is even interested in that question. It seems to want to have it both ways. When the people in Theodore\u2019s life learn he\u2019s \u201cdating\u201d an OS, some take it in stride and ask what she\u2019s like or invite them on double dates. His ex-wife, on the other hand, denies the reality of the relationship, suggesting that Samantha\u2019s basically a sex doll, and evidence that Theodore can\u2019t deal with real, uncontrollable, unpredictable people.<\/p>\n

Of course, she\u2019s wrong in her assumption that Samantha is either controllable or predictable, but is Samantha real? I think the filmmakers believe she is, and even takes this for granted. Theodore\u2019s ex-wife is presented as a bitter person whose naysaying is an outlier opinion, but it\u2019s an old conundrum worthy of a Philip K. Dick novel: when software is sophisticated enough, fast enough, colloquial enough, and humorous enough to seem<\/em>\u00a0like a real person, will it even matter if it\u2019s only an illusion? Will they deserve equal rights regardless? Whether you believe in the Singularity<\/a>\u00a0or not, it seems inevitable we\u2019re going to be asking these questions in the not-at-all-too-distant future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw the movie Her. This post will contain spoilers for the whole story of the film, so don\u2019t read…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,9],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-consumer-products","tag-her"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}