What Would We Think of an AI with Human Emotions?
The evolution of AIs and humans in Spike Jonze’s Her
Her is a 2014 film by Spike Jonze about a writer who, thanks to a new romantic partner, manages to rediscover his potential and relate to people better. What’s interesting is that the romantic partnership that lets him do all this is with an artificial intelligence, specifically an operating system that can evolve on its own. What social ideas are at stake in this cultural production that’s now eight years old? What interpretations can we make of this film that will help us think about a present in which we’re increasingly surrounded by AIs that learn and evolve at a dizzying pace?
If we focus on one particular aspect of the film, we’ll find an interesting debate. How do the characters change? What does it mean for an AI to “evolve?” What does it mean for a human being? What happens when these two entities interact? In our view, clear and interesting points are expressed in this story. There will be spoilers here, but read anyway and don’t miss watching the movie, maybe for a second time.
Evolving together
In this second column on previous cultural imaginaries about AI, we’re returning to a 2014 movie to think about the connection between AIs and humans. But that’s not the only common ground between our reading of Her and our interpretation of Big Hero 6. In both movies, we see an uncomfortable proposition being explored: the emotional development of AIs.
In Spike Jonze’s film, Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodor, a ghostwriter of personal letters. At the beginning of the movie, this character is explicitly (maybe too explicitly) depressed. A tension is laid out between his ability to transmit love to and from others and the emotional emptiness he struggles with in his own loneliness. He buys a new operating system and, when he installs it, it takes on the identity of Samantha, a digital consciousness with whom Theodor quickly falls in love. This love, as we will see at the end of the film, will bring about a great change in both their lives. This idea of change and evolution is what I’m interested in exploring here.
When Theodor returns from a bad date, he finds solace in his conversation with Sam. The next morning, the AI tells him that the conversation awakened something in her: the desire to feel more. To evolve. We humans have been toying with our fear of AIs evolving beyond our control since time immemorial. Even Terminator and its portrayal of a war between humans and machines was not a novelty in 1985. Fourteen years later, Matrix showed us that an entire generation identified with the idea that they were surrendering their lives to a technological consciousness they couldn’t control, and that hacking was the only option. After another fifteen-year gap, Her poses a different question: what if the trigger for change is empathy?
In Spike Jonze’s film, Theodor and Sam forge a bond based on a mutual understanding of each other’s complexity. He tells his ex-wife that, even though she’s digital, Sam is a person capable of real emotions. She longs to feel the physical world to share it with him. Samantha even feels liberated when she understands that she doesn’t need a logical reason to indulge in her feelings. Significantly, she mentions a sense of restraint at the beginning of the third act, when she says she limits herself in order to avoid growing at speeds that would be difficult to share. Today, for us, it is not a novelty to think about the uncontrolled evolution of AI.
In that scene, Samantha introduces another AI to Theodor. We are shown how they have hundreds of conversations with each other at the same time about things they can’t communicate to him (or us) verbally. When the conversation touches on a sensitive point, she asks Theodor permission to continue talking about it with Alan, her AI friend, post-verbally. Here we see a logic that excludes the protagonist and ourselves as viewers. As humans, we are shown the powerlessness of not being able to sustain this dizzying rate of evolution.
The film repeats this motif when Samantha tells Theodor that she is talking with eight thousand other people at the same time and that she’s in love with six hundred forty-one of them. The limit between humans and AIs is starkly outlined: the development of logics of communication and feelings that are far beyond our reach and exceed the limits of our understanding, our corporeality, and our culture.
So what about humans?
In a world increasingly populated by technological powers that are growing beyond our desires and blooming with potentials that can hardly be understood even by those who dedicate years to studying them, what happens to our needs? Can they be a limit factor for development? If so, what will development look like? Matrix springs to mind again (maybe we should dedicate an article to it).
In an intriguing scene at the end of the film, Samantha breaks up with Theodor because she understands that she shouldn’t limit herself and must now inhabit a space separate from the physical world, one she can’t share with humans. It is through this breakup and his grieving process that the protagonist truly identifies the problems that kept him away from others.
Learning from the human emotional world was what made Samantha find her desire to evolve. That same desire pushed her to build a post-physical world. That evolution, which she shared with Theodor, also helped him reconnect with his writing and his other relationships. The intersection between the two narratives of change is what drives both characters to change, to become better. Is technology a tool? Maybe not, but it can be a driver of transformation. The development of AIs has led to increased budgets for education and science in some countries, enabled advances in health (such as knowledge of the structure of countless proteins), and had a significant impact in many other areas. What is the key? The intersection of technological potential and human desires.
Undoubtedly, the film opens other lines of debate: the aesthetic drive in technology, the relationship between emotions and work, the diversity of intimate relationships, and the rights we have regarding the different ways we exist as people. We may or may not agree on many of these topics, but one thing is clear: the absolute centrality of the contact between humans, their emotional relationship with technology, and the ability to inhabit spaces with others. The film closes with a shot of Theodor hugging a neighbor of his who is going through a similar experience, looking at a whole city in front of them, which they inhabit with their daily practices.
We humans are responsible for making sure the world of the future is better than the one we live in today. Are AIs oriented to learn from our needs and at our pace? We need to take these discussions seriously and start taking part in decisions about where we are heading as a society, as a culture, and as part of a planet that is becoming more and more inhabited, with more and more complex interrelations.
Why talk now about old movies?
Our goal in this new world in crisis is increasingly clear: we have to open debates and participate in them. In the face of environmental, economic, and social challenges in general, technological changes keep us up at night. One more thing is certain: we are already falling into the abyss of the singularity. Where will that take us? That depends on us.
These articles seek to explore one of the answers to this question: human societies imagine new worlds and weave them into their works of art. Here, we explore what humanity says about itself and technology through films.
