Since growing up into a culture of action-suspenseful sci-fi films, the typical theme on how the human race is placed in the middle of a movement where robots or artificial intelligences would become a part of our lives. The traditional mindset of robots either being our slaves to satisfy our wants and needs or where a company or secret organization developed a machine that goes into a man-killing rampage. However, when the technology world goes beyond the barrier of reality and fantasy, programmers to engineers produced modern-day devices that resembled themselves as robots or artificial intelligences.
After watching the movie, “Her” by Spike Jonze, as the audience, the plot of this modern day sci-fi was focusing on a sensitive and soulful writer, named Theodore, who later on built an “interesting” relationship with an operating system named Samantha. Like today’s sci-fi films, there wasn’t the cliché-terminating robot or a community of robots rebelling against the human race, but these OS’s preferred to live one with humans as whole. However, this trend of robots and humans becoming friends, or in this film’s case, lovers, the bond between humans and artificial intelligences isn’t well developed to maintain a bond over friendship or love. Unlike typical romantic or good-buddy films, these two worlds do collide, but ended before the story is finished. In other words, Theodore and Samantha ended up separating from each other because their worlds are completely different and their bond isn’t practical for a “healthy” relationship. Despite the bittersweet relationship between Theodore and Samantha, their unique bond was close being to be forbidden or abnormal.
Theodore waiting for OS to work
When Samantha and the other operating systems decided to leave, the movement had established this sense of evolution on how both humans and artificial intelligence developed dependence and independence among each other. Furthermore, these aspects would question on how well and strong does the human race trust and relate to robots or artificial intelligence. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution came to mind to illustrate if one-day bionics would walk among humans and it’s decedents.
Expanding on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
From a segment of a Radio Lab podcast, the episode focused on interaction and relationship on individuals or communities that grew fond with robots and computers. In other words, these various individual tend to later on describe these technological devices to be more humans than machines. For instance, the Radio Lab crew interviewed a man named, Robert Epstein, who didn’t realize he’d fallen in love with a virtual booth while dating it online. A contrast to how Theodore viewed Samantha. When Theodore first met his new operating system, he knew Samantha was just an artificial intelligence, but, he didn’t know how advance Samantha was to be capable of “adapting” to the human lifestyle where she slowly reprogrammed herself to become more human.
Citation:
“Talking to Machines.” Radio Labs. WNYC Radio, 31 May 2011. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.
HER. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014. DVD.