That’s what I kept
thinking while rewatching “Her,” Spike Jonze’s 2013 burst of prescience. The
film follows the perfectly named Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix),
a sad-sack introvert with a submerged streak of narcissism, as he falls in love
with an artificial intelligence named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson),
who begins as his personal assistant, becomes his friend and muse, turns into
his lover and companion, and then — well, I don’t want to ruin it.
اضافة اعلان
“Her” saw something that most of AI commentary is missing:
These systems are going to upend our relationships long before they remake our
economies. The magic of large language models is that they can talk about
anything, in the style of anyone, for as long as you might want to converse
with them. The problem is they make things up.
That is going to be a hurdle for anyone who wants to replace
a lawyer or a researcher with an AI system. Conducting oversight for a system
that is more eloquent and knowledgeable than you are is going to be tough.
But making things up is fine for a friend or a lover. Maybe
even preferable! My most treasured friends are not the ones who say only true
things or restrict themselves to the firm boundaries of the known. AI will
quickly become a perfected companion in your pocket. It will be precisely
tunable to the kind of relationship you want to have. Want a snarky best
friend? A cerebral pen pal?
Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.
A management coach trained on the collected writings of
Peter Drucker? A supportive father figure who sounds like Ian McEwan? It will
all be possible, and more. Nothing new needs to be invented, no profound
technological hurdles cleared. You can already procure an AI companion,
complete with a sexy avatar, from Replika. Inflection AI just released Pi, a
chatbot designed for emotional support and connection. This isn’t coming; it’s
here.
What Jonze understood in building his film around the anomic
Twombly is that this technology will come in a particular context: America is lonely.
Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, recently released an 82-page report
called “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” From 1990 to 2021, the
number of Americans who said they have five or more close friends fell by 25
percentage points. Young adults report being even lonelier than the elderly.
America is, by any historical standard, unimaginably rich and powerful, and yet
we’ve lost what matters most: community and connection.
That is the America these AI companions will enter into. That’s
the America they will upend. We worry about 12-year-olds today because they
don’t see their friends in person. We will worry about them tomorrow because
not enough of their friends will be people.
What will this do to our relationships with one another?
What happens if and when AI tuned to seem human to humans develops the
appearance or the reality of an inner, autonomous life of its own? These are
the questions “Her” asks but never answers. What follows here is a spoiler but
not of anything that makes the movie interesting. “Her” ends abruptly, in a
reverse deus ex machina. The AIs leave us behind to form a community with one
another. The more troubling, and likely, question is one the movie dodges: What
if they stay?
Read more Opinion and Analysis
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
