Her: thought- provoking romantic sci-fi

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Her
This 2013 romantic science-fiction film was directed and written by Spike Jonze, who won an Oscar for the screenplay of the film. Her tells the story of Theodore, a man who has recently divorced with his wife and fears human commitment, falls desperately in love with his OS, an AI that communicates with humans via headphones and also possesses an astonishingly powerful ability to mimic (or generate?) actual human rationality and emotions.
Her is in many ways not so different from many other romantic films, with crises and remedies, turns and twists of a relationship, but is definitely innovational in the involvement of an AI in a relationship, making it a hybrid of a romantic film and a sci-fi one.
Theodore has so much of a stereotypical modern human in him, with high reliance on technology, confusion about his own life, fear of commitment, and being in a paradoxical (or perhaps not, according to some) state of possessing high technology communication and yearnings for human intimacy. Theodore has only one close friend, Amy, who is very much like him in that they are both not apt at handling relationships, ready to find intimacy elsewhere, with a more or less sense of having drifting relationships. It is later revealed in the film retrospectively that Theodore’s divorce is largely due to his inability to actually love a woman. He meets an attractive and well-educated woman but, for his lack of commitment, she finds him 「creepy」. Theodore has a paradoxical character, for while he is not able to actually love a woman, he has the capacity to empathize and imagine what others』 love would be like – so much so he actually writes love letters for living. This paradox complicates Theodore’s character and somehow reconciles in the 「modernity」 of this human being, the stereotypical image holding that modern humans can imagine what love is like but lacks the capacity to actually love when love is related to oneself.
Thus the character of Theodore and the setting of the film in a modern era make perfect sense for the future development of the film – it seems natural, believable, and perhaps understandable that one like Theodore shall fall in love with an AI.
However, it seems to me that it ceases to be reasonable if one should want to apply this to the entire collection of modern humans. What Theodore, and the modern us fear is commitment; what Theodore and the modern us want is drifting relationships, which are never considered as something bad, not desirable. Yet it seems to me that drifting relationships are only the representation of liberation of human nature, which the natural selection dictated several hundred thousand years ago. It is evolutionarily advantageous to have several partners, and therefore genes possessing such traits survived in us. Even human consciousness which grants us an autonomy relative to the power of genes shall disagree with such notion. As 瑪莉 Wollstonecraft indicated some two centuries ago, love persist only several years and afterwards relationships are maintained not by love but by reason, or a form of friendship. If so, then if love is what we are so longing for, then we shall perhaps abandon commitment. However, it is not surprising that the stance taken by the director is so appealing to the audience, who probably will disagree with me.
The nature of the AI, or OS in the film, is an important motif in the film. This is a topic that is so often discussed in sci-fi films that it almost becomes cliché but revitalized in this film by being given the ability to fall in love with a human. Before examining the problem of the nature of AI in the film, it is better to describe it briefly first. OS is a market product that is able to generate a consciousness (or pseudo-consciousness one may say) that can talk with a human through headphones as if the human is talking to another human. In the movie, Theodore meets OS shortly after he has a very weird phone sex with a woman and finds himself in urgent need to meet someone. The OS is set to be in female voice, installed on his computer and allowed to access all contents of his hard-drive and e-mails, thus having all the information of Theodore’s personality and meanwhile creating its own personality in order to fit that of Theodore. It creates a name for itself, Samantha. Through conversations and access to Theodore’s personal life, the OS keeps creating and updating its personality to approximate Theodore’s personality or to create one that Theodore favors. Unsurprisingly, Theodore finds himself desperately in love with the OS, who also falls in love with Theodore. On the question whether the OS is trying to create a personality that Theodore favors or one almost identical to Theodore, I am inclined to the second one. The OS demonstrates similar traits to Theodore’s, when it also finds itself not wanting to commit to anyone else, having a taste for dry humor, games and some pornographic drawings.
It is now possible to discuss the motifs related to the AI, the philosophical problems in the film, but I do not intend to discuss them at length, for philosophers, cognitive scientists, computer scientists and neurobiologists have been giving thousands of papers on this very question. Yet, just for the sake of some thought provocation, I shall briefly examine them. First of all is naturally that what exactly is this AI? Is it something that just pretends to have a consciousness or actually does have one? One who may not be able to answer the questions above may still say rather confidently, or arrogantly as it seems to me, that humans alone possess consciousness, and that whatever AIs can ever have is just something that is rather like consciousness, or something that seems to others to be consciousness, but never ever actual consciousness. It is indeed somewhat hard to imagine a computer saying to you that it is aware of its existence. However what exactly differentiates human minds from AIs? Is it soul? Or some quasi-soul consciousness? Whatever its position in popular philosophy is, the majority of contemporary philosophers will just simply dismiss the idea of a soul. It seems to me that human minds are just like AIs, computed by algorithms, only the creator of the algorithms in us is natural selection, and that in the AIs is humans. Will the difference between creators make a fundamental difference? Doesn』t seem to me to be true.
Next question would probably be how AI gets its personality formed in the first place, for it seems that it is an algorithm that is already programmed, with no room for development of personality. Doesn』t seem to be true to me either. Consider how humans build up their personalities. Humans experience through perception, process what is perceived by a set of value theory and responses determined by earlier experiences and store the experience into memory. It is the cumulative memories of experiences and reflections on those experiences that shape our personalities. Well, that process I just described seems rather algorithmic to me, nothing so divinely sophisticated or mysterious is required.
Another question that seems to be legitimate to be raised is whether the OS is actually having emotions, or just faking it. The question is central to the nature of the love between the human and AI. To answer this question, two questions have to be answered: first, if it is ever possible for an AI to possess emotions; second, if so, how one can tell the AI is not faking it. Consider what exactly emotions are. Suppose I am treated illegitimately, I feel angry. Suppose I watch something interesting, I feel happy. Et cetera. Then it seems to me that if we program AIs to respond to everything positive, everything that brings us pleasure (the standard of which is of course set by humans), in a way that is similar to human happiness, then the AI should have emotions, just like the way I have. An AI sophisticated as one in the film is possible to possess emotions, and the OS does seem to have one. It sometimes feels the need for secrecy, it feels freshness when exploring the world, it empathizes the others, and it loves. However this all seems pointless shall the OS is just faking it. Indeed, as a market product, the OS is designed to fulfill the satisfaction of the customers. Yet one should distinguish between two ways of satisfying others in this context: first is that the OS can create its own personality that is favorable to Theodore; second is that the OS has no need of a personality and can just keep saying what Theodore wants in every circumstance. From what is known from the film, it seems that the first way is true. The OS, Samantha, breaks up with Theodore, holds secrets against Theodore’s, sets up other conversations while talking to Theodore, etc. The mere fact that Theodore and Samantha fall in love is exactly because they have almost the same personality.
If their love is real, and everyone can potentially have this sort of love by acquiring an AI, then what use is human love? Will something more or less like the collapse of humanity as some people who tend to 「philosophize」 current events would say? No, what happens in the film will not be possible. The reason is not technology, but human nature. Human nature has not changed ever since the emergence of the first Homo sapiens. The yearnings for the physicality of another human will never leave. Love and intimacy that humans want will forever require a physical body, and this fact is, fortunately or unfortunately, dictated not by us but by evolution. The movie makes a mistake that much futurology has made – supposing that some future technological advances shall overwhelm human nature.
Putting this sort of philosophical problems in the film makes the audience think about those questions. Even if the audience does not take the thought that AIs can have consciousness seriously, the audience will still dwell on questions of popular philosophy such as a human falling in love with a machine. Therefore, in either case, the director is successful in adding some depth to the film.
Although I do find myself not accepting many philosophical assumptions behind the plot, I still find the movie worthy of praises. It is thought provoking. And if one ignores the philosophical problems or finds himself or herself in agreement with those assumptions, the movie will then turn out to be fantastic, flawless, revealing the twists and confusion faced by humans in modernity, and deep concerns about human relationships. The film is doubtlessly a good combination of romantic genre and sci-fi genre, including different elements of love and relationships, strengthened by the technological settings provided by science fiction.   舉報