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I just got done watching the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix. I must say that this movie hit a little to close to home for me. The movie revolves around a heart broken man who is in the midst of divorce and isnt sure how to move on with his life. Then he learns of a new Artificial Intelligent Operating System (AI OS) that is being marketed as the very first personal computer operating system.
After installing the software to his computer, he and the OS begin conversing, asking simple ‘get to know you’ questions. He at one point asks if she has a name of which she chooses Samantha. As the movie progresses Joaquin and Samantha begin growing closer and form a relationship. As an AI, she is able to expand and learn past her programming. So they begin “dating” and he shows her new experiences, and he falls in love with her because she understands him and is able to fill that void in his life.
Well I began thinking about it, and I could see myself in Joaquin Phoenix’s shoes if that were me and an AI OS. Here you have ‘someone’ who is with you at any given moment, who has the ability to ‘feel’ and to ‘enjoy’ your company and time you two spend together. I could see myself becoming wrapped up in something like that, because of the emotional connection vs the physical. If you think about it, we pretty much already have those types or relationships.
With things like Facebook and Twitter and Social Networking Sites, we develop virtual relationships with people that many times we don’t ever know in real life. Yet we come to depend on our daily interactions with them. We love seeing their photos, their status updates, the funny random things that they post on their profiles, but whats to say that they are actually ‘real’? We take for granted that they are real but what if it was just a computer program and Photoshop that makes up that person that we have come to know and love on some level?
I could see depressed and lonely people latching on to their computer systems and falling madly in love with the digital persona. I for one know that I would/could. But with the development of such a system, I fear for the human race, as we would become so self absorbed in our digital romances and lives that all physical interaction would cease to exist, except for maybe persons who could not afford computers and the OS, or those people who are anti-technology.
But all in all it was an amazing movie that had complex emotions and feeling, and personal undertones of how people who suffer from depression and loneliness seek out comforts and build bonds with things that are sometimes either inanimate or that feel real.
