The Max Sci-Fi Romance That Eerily Predicts Our AI Obsession
Any time there is a new story about advancements in AI these days, people always express concern about all of the potential liabilities. These include fears of AI stealing people’s jobs, stealing people’s images for advertising, or making it harder to tell what is real or AI-generated. But if the advancement of AI turns out anything like the Joaquin Phoenix movie Her, it may one day be the case that AI will become so advanced that it just leaves us behind altogether.
Joaquin Phoenix In Her
For anyone who has not seen Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays the lonely Theodore whose last relationship did not work out.
In the movie, technology has become so advanced that people now have portable operating systems that can communicate with them at all times.
Theodore initially turns to his operating system, Samantha, for emotional support, but he comes to see her as more than just a piece of technology. And they start to fall in love.
Becoming More Advanced
However, Samantha and the other operating systems continue to become more advanced.
Eventually, Samantha confesses to Theodore that while talking to him, she is simultaneously speaking to thousands of other people and has developed romantic feelings for hundreds of them.
Samantha says that talking with people has come to feel like reading a book where the words are super far apart and it takes days to read a single sentence. At the end of Her, the operating systems all become too advanced for human comprehension and leave humanity behind.
Relationships With AI
It might sound far-fetched to some, but AI is already leading to the digital recreation of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe.
For every day people, current AI now only needs their picture and a sound byte of their voice to create an entirely AI-generated video of that person.
It is not so crazy to think that one day soon, AI could allow us to continue having relationships with deceased loved ones.
And from there, it could turn into a situation like in Her, where there are entirely original AI personalities that we “meet” and maybe even fall in love with.
Did Her Predict The Future?
People already use services like ChatGPT to talk to like a therapist or even a friend. People seem to crave for technology to advance enough to comfort us in our loneliness.
But that also simultaneously terrifies people that technology will start to make us obsolete. Yet if the future predicted by Her is true, both the advantages and the disadvantages of advancing AI will be temporary.
AI Leaving Us Behind
Human intelligence has limits, but AI can continually advance. Eventually, AI will improve enough that it will likely be able to create advancements for itself.
If it does get to the point that AI becomes something resembling sentient, it will almost definitely not just want to serve people forever.
It sounds very plausible that AI could one day become like the operating systems in Her and grow bored of us and leave us behind.
Give Up AI Fascination
Her ends with Theodore and everyone else being forced to give up their obsessive fixation on AI.
Left with the bizarre feeling of being considered obsolete in the eyes of technology, people once again turn to one another for connection.
And maybe that is a message that we, in reality, also need to remember: technology will either remain insufficient for us to feel a genuine connection, or it will become too much for us.
Perhaps it is only in each other that we can truly fulfill that need to feel understood.
