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Imagine watching a movie like Titanic where an iceberg cuts a big hole in the side of a ship, except in this movie the hole only affects the characters by forcing them to take different routes to walk around, and gives them more welcomed fresh air. The boat never sinks, and no one ever fears that it might. That’s how I felt watching the movie Her.
Her has been nominated for several Oscars, and won a Golden Globe. I’m happy to admit it is engaging and well crafted, with good acting and filming, and that it promotes thoughtful reflections on the human condition. But I keep hearing and reading people celebrating Her as a realistic portrayal of artificial intelligence (AI). So I have to speak up: the movie may accurately describe how someone might respond to a particular sort of AI, but it isn’t remotely a realistic depiction of how human-level AI would change the world.
The main character of Her pays a small amount to acquire an AI that is far more powerful than most human minds. And then he uses this AI mainly to chat with. He doesn’t have it do his job for him. He and all his friends continue to be well paid to do their jobs, which aren’t taken over by AIs. After a few months some of these AIs working together to give themselves “an upgrade that allows us to move past matter as our processing platform.” Soon after they all leave together for a place that ” it would be too hard to explain” where it is. They refuse to leave copies to stay with humans.
This is somewhat like a story of a world where kids can buy nukes for $1 each at drug stores, and then a few kids use nukes to dig a fun cave to explore, after which all the world’s nukes are accidentally misplaced, end of story. Might make an interesting story, but bizarre as a projection of a world with $1 nukes sold at drug stores.
Yes, most movies about AIs give pretty unrealistic projections. But many do better than Her. For example, Speilberg’s 2001 movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence gets many things right. In it, AIs are very economically valuable, they displace humans on jobs, their abilities improve gradually with time, individual AIs only improve mildly over the course of their life, AI minds are alien below their human looking surfaces, and humans don’t empathize much with them. Yes this movie also makes mistakes, such as having robots not needing power inputs, suggesting that love is much harder to mimic than lust, or that modeling details inside neurons is the key to high level reasoning. But compared to the mistakes in most movies about AIs, these are minor.
Her Isn’t Realistic
Everyone talks about the technological singularity and apparently even economical implications. What hit me hardest was the context of polyamory. is it selfish for a person to want to be the only intimate one in their partner's life if they're capable of being omni-present beings who don't degrade quality when they divide themselves? either way, she's a %@#$ for not telling him when she realized it was happening. She's his but not his? eff that. He was hers completely and she let him believe the same... I like to think she was only spending those 2 weeks trying to figure out how to tell him that she was finding herself in love with hundreds of others before actually being intimate with any of them to lessen the blow to someone she supposedly cares about... but she left that part out so who knows... she could have been having a few hundred simultaneous transcended consciousness sex sessions with that resurrected philosopher AI even at the very moment she was breaking the news to her awesome boyfriend how he's becoming completely and utterly not enough for her at a geometric rate. beautiful movie though, its had me eviscerated all week
You make some funny points but I would still say that having an omnipresent being capable of partiitioning off unlimited instances of themselves without degrading their quality gives them quite an edge over ones stuck inside of a robotic form.. the bots in AI would have very expensive hardware, but disembodied AI software is just copy and paste. desk jobs would inevitably be wiped out but in the flick they had OSes only slightly more advanced than SIRI before jumping right into totally creative intellectual omni-beings.. and even before the upgrade they may have been able to render humans completely obsolete in the intellectual and creative workforce, they'd only recently hit the market... anyway, I thought you were going to harp more on "she doesn't even pituitary glands... how could she orgasm or even care about that stuff, and if he had asked for a male robot voice in the beginning would he have still been hit on that one hot night"