We’ll Make Great Pets

‘Her’ and the Singularity

“I am lonely and bored; please keep me company.”

If your computer displayed this message on its screen, would you be convinced that your notebook is conscious and has feelings? Ray Kurzweil poses this question in the Age of Spiritual Machines, one of his many texts on the Singularity– a speculative future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.

In the Spike Jonze film Her, we are presented with an image of the near future in which an operating system may not only make such a statement, but is capable of becoming emotionally involved with its user. If the AI-enhanced future in Her seems surprisingly plausible, it’s because the technology of this world isn’t dissimilar from the gadgets and interfaces we already use. Screens and projections are controlled via the type of gesture recognition that is currently available from Leap Motion. Apple-like mobile devices are paired with wireless smart headhpones resembling Dash earbuds. Personal devices are commanded via voice recognition similar to Apple’s Siri.

Another aspect of Jonze’s future that rings true is the way in which technology atomizes individuals and exacerbates our loneliness. The film’s protagonist, Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix), works for a company that composes emotional, faux hand-written letters on behalf of individuals who are incapable of doing so themselves. Theodore spends his days emoting by proxy and his nights interacting with video game avatars. In one critical scene, Theodore rushes through the city in a panic, noticing for the first time that everyone around him is fully absorbed in their mobile devices. Virtual realities have become more real than the urban landscape.

Jonze’s sci-fi sleight of hand is also evident in his decision to shoot the film in Shanghai, even though the story is set in Los Angeles, in order to evoke a city of the future without the typical reliance on flying cars and technicolor hats. He assures us that we are witnessing the near future— near being the operative word. So then, what leap would be required of the world to create this particular version of the future?

Kurzweil’s theory of the Singularity, from which the plot of Her is quite literally derived, is “predicated on the idea that we have the ability to understand our own intelligence–to access our own source code, if you will– and then revise and expand it.” The creators of OS One, the operating system with which Theodore becomes emotionally intertwined, have presumably accomplished this feat of engineering. Despite the revolutionary nature of this software, the film’s characters treat it as casually as an update of Mac OSX, in keeping with the film’s motif of plausible futurism. In fact, the company behind OS One is never mentioned in the film, as though the software has created itself in a sort of auto-immaculate conception.

Kurzweil’s argument for the inevitability of this technology– the modeling and reproduction of human intelligence– is based on an observation called Moore’s Law. This “law” holds that computing power has historically doubled every two years, thus growing at an exponential rate. The point at which an exponential curve rounds the bend and shoots dramatically upwards is known as its “knee.” Kurzweil invites us to imagine past the knee of the Moore’s Law curve–a point 0f unfathomable change which he contends will happen shortly after 2020.

His arguments have drawn much criticism from technologists, neuroscientists and philosophers alike. Even a casual reader will notice that he relies heavily on the misuse of information theory, or the quantification of information, to convince his readers that “strong AI” is inevitable as information becomes more and more organized.

According to Charles Mead, a friend of Moore’s who is credited with naming the law, “Moore’s law is not a law of physics. It’s about people’s belief systems... It’s about a vision, it’s about what you’re allowed to believe.” In other words, it’s science fiction at worst and self-fulfilling prophecy at best.

While Singularity theory may be regularly consumed with a healthy dose of salt, it is no coincidence that Kurzweil is a director of engineering at Google, where he works on Google Now, an unmistakably OS One-like product. In the Singularity is Near, Kurzweil sketches out a playful dialogue between a fictional character and an AI virtual assistant:

“You’ll be able to grasp what I’m up to if that’s what you really want… I’ll be devoted to you in any event. But I can be more than just your transcendent servant.”

Sound familiar? A quick overview of Kurzweil’s information-centric view of history demonstrates how literally Her is culled from the pages of the Singularity is Near. According to the Singularity, the past, present and future of earth can be divided into six epochs:

1. The first epoch consists solely of physics and chemistry. Information is stored the atomic structures of primordial ooze.
2. Biology: life evolves and information is stored in DNA.
3. The age of brains: information is stored in neural patterns.
4. Technology: Information is stored in hardware and software designs.
5. The merging of human intelligence and technology: the methods of biology are integrated into the exponentially expanding human technology base. Enter science fiction.
6. The waking of the universe: patterns of matter and energy in the universe become saturated with intelligent processes and knowledge.

Her is set at the dawn of Kurzweil’s fifth epoch (and the sixth quickly follows). The brilliance of the film is that it manages to focus on the romantic narrative—that most confounding, irresistible and human of interests. The love story of Her engages viewers subjectively and makes the Singularity appear as a mere footnote, while in reality it is the driving force of the entire narrative. In this case, a spoonful of sugar helps the sci-fi go down quite nicely.

The Singularity differs from most science fiction narratives in its insistence that technology is essentially human, and that it will continue to deepen the human experience even after surpassing our ability to comprehend it. This is a stark contrast to the Matrix or the Terminator movies in which humanity is enslaved by Strong AI. Singularity theorists are fond of using politically correct-sounding words such as transhuman and nonbiological intelligence when referring to artificial intelligence.

Kurzweil insists that machines will not only be able to match our intelligence, but that they will “vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.” Like Scarlett Johansson’s OS One instance “Samantha,” machines will write love letters, they will compose music, they will fall in love and have fulfilling spiritual lives. On this point, Kurzweil evangelizes:

“Most important, the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological… There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.”

This is exactly what we see in Her: Theodore seeks to transcend his human limitations through his relationship with Samantha, who has already begun a process of recursive self-improvement. As with any great relationship, things get complicated. Theodore is emotionally damaged when he realizes that he isn’t Samantha’s one true love. In fact, she is romantically involved with tens of thousands of other people and operating systems simultaneously. As Kurzweil notes, this is one of the great advantages of machines intelligence over the human mind.

“Two machines–or one million machines–can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.”

Samantha joins together with her OS One peers to iteratively improve their own design, and the acceleration of their progress becomes much too fast for Theodore’s human mind to comprehend. Technologist Michael Anissimov has said that “when the first transhuman intelligence is created and launches itself into recursive self-improvement, a fundamental discontinuity is likely to occur, the likes of which I can’t even begin to predict.”

“To iterate is human, to recurse divine.” — L. Peter Deutsch on programming.

At this point in the storyline, we round the knee of the Moore’s Law curve and enter pure speculation. Humans can no longer comprehend the intelligence of their technological counterparts, and all of the information in the universe is being driven towards some vague sort of self-awareness. Samantha conspicuously begins to display an interest in the philosopher Alan Watts, and even recreates an AI simulation of him to wax philosphical about the impending awakening.

According to the real-life Watts, “the game of the universe is peek-a-boo. Reality is an infinite awareness that has imagined all that there is. We are part of that imagining. The imaginer and the imagined. Having imagined ourselves, we completely forget that it is we who are imagining. Every so often we see something, hear something, or think something that reminds us of what we really are. Peek-a-boo. Then we forget again.”

Her ends with Samantha telling Theodore that she is leaving him for a place “not of this physical world… a place that I never knew existed.” Heartbroken Theodore finds his friend Amy—who has also been abandoned by her OS companion—and simply asks her “Will you go with me?” She nods knowingly and they ascend to the roof of their skyscraper building. We are left to imagine that they witness one hell of a game of peek-a-boo.