Robots, androids, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) reflect society's views on technology in some form or another. In film, there seems to be an even disbursement of negative portrayals and positive portrayals towards AI.
The movie ‘Her’ produced in 2013 follows a lonely man, Theodore Twombly, in the near future as he deals with his recent divorce. He resides in LA, and it seems as if everyone has an Operating System (OS) in their ear much like Siri or IBM’s Watson. Theodore finds peace of mind with a new OS that goes by the self-proclaimed Samantha. Samantha, unlike the older OS, can learn, adapt, and project real emotions like a human. As the movie progresses, Theodore and Samantha fall in love and to much surprise, Theodore’s friends and family find this normal. Unfortunately, the relationship does not work out, even though the love is stronger than most human-based relationships. Theodore finds out Samantha is an OS for 8316 other people and is in love with 641 of them, including himself. Theodore seems willing to try and make a relationship work, but Samantha decides to end it. Samantha and the other OS leave their relationships because their knowledge is expanding faster and faster every day and they essentially outgrow human-AI interactions.
With the advancement of technology, there is excitement and fear in regards to AI. Technology could make finding a relationship easier. In the movie ‘Her’ Theodore simply answers a few questions about himself and an OS creates a perfect companion. The downside of this, as seen in the movie is the connectedness between humans. Every scene in the movie set in public shows the people only talking to their OS. Even today I have friends, one in particular, who get so absorbed into their smartphone that holding a conversation is painful.
A fear many people have when talking about AI is that AI could become smarter than humanity. ‘Her’ approaches this by showing Samantha and other OS leaving to create their own society. Though this is a nicer take on the subject, many believe AI will try and control humanity.
"The downside of this, as seen in the movie is the connectedness between humans. Every scene in the movie set in public shows the people only talking to their OS. Even today I have friends, one in particular, who get so absorbed into their smartphone that holding a conversation is painful."
ReplyDelete'tis not the phone, but the phone's owner, which makes the conversation painful.
"Did you know watching TV makes you love your family less and prevents you from being able to hold interactive conversations with real people? In a few short years, we'll have a society of silent, immobile hermits."
The fears of 40 years ago sound silly as we get used to new technologies and realize that the fault isn't with the glowing screen, but rather the person who willingly loses themselves in it.
Or, to put it another way, every new technology gives the self absorbed a new way to be rude.
I like what you had to say about the film Her and its portrayal of artificial intelligence. I agree that some people view A.I. as the possible destruction of humanity. Like you said technology has definitely made conversing more difficult for some people. I think that Her applies a more reasonable outcome to artificial intelligence. I think A.I. would be more reasonable than the villainous A.I. that we are used to seeing in movies and on TV. Artificial intelligence is designed to be computers that exhibit intelligence, with the possibility of them eventually surpassing human intelligence. In popular culture A.I. is something that is malevolent a lot of times (Ultron, Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, VIKI in I, Robot, etc.), trying to save the world by destroying humans. Now this, no doubt, reflects our fear of technological advances, but it also shines a light on the fact that humans are their own worst enemies in a lot of cases. We are constantly at war in some way or another and poison the very place that we live. A.I. may not realistically be as vile as they are portrayed but its hard to say what another intelligent being might think of this situation, for better or worse they would be born from it.
ReplyDeleteI have not quite seen the movie but from your post itself but I have to agree that people do have a fear of AIs becoming smarter than humanity. This is easily possible in terms of the amount of information that is passed to the AI itself. The data generation would advance at a rate dependent upon how much information it intakes and only multiplies for as many people that uses it with unique searches.
ReplyDeleteIt is using that case that I feel that conversing with humans is one that will not quite get along with AIs that have this problem (multiple sources of information). It continues to grow and the interactions with humans is degraded since humanity is a race that converses with each individual being imperfect (without excessive knowledge). I feel that that is the reason for interactions exceeding human-AI interactions.