8 ms·

A Review of Her by Ray Kurzweil

74 points by henryaj 13y ago

danieltillett 13y ago
Ray certainly seems very certain of the exact timing of future events - I have enough trouble knowing if I should take an umbrella to work or not.
- henryaj 13y ago
  (I can't help with the Singularity predictions, but for the weather, try Dark Sky - http://darkskyapp.com/ http://darkskyapp.com/. It's pretty amazing. Hyper-local, to-the-minute weather forecasts.)
  - danieltillett 13y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion :)
    - Angostura 13y ago
      The free BBC Weather app is excellent if you are in the UK
- jpadkins 13y ago
  He has a pretty good track record for this stuff. IIRC Some of his AI predications from the 80s were accurate to +/- 3 years.
  - oskarth 13y ago
    Do you have any links to this? Would be interesting to look at.
    - nathcd 13y ago
      According to Wikipedia, he "extrapolated the performance of chess software to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue..."[0] There are a number of additional predictions listed on the page below as well, including things such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the explosion in internet use. It also lists his predictions for the coming 50 years. [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil#Accuracy_of_predictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...
      - oskarth 13y ago
        The chess one sounds like Moore's law and knowing something about the complexity of chess. Considering the following predictions for early 2000s (made in 1990): - Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages. - Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words. - Exoskeletal, robotic leg prostheses allow the paraplegic to walk. - Telephone calls are routinely screened by intelligent answering machines that ask questions to determine the call's nature and priority. - "Cybernetic chauffeurs" can drive cars for humans and can be retrofitted into existing cars. They work by communicating with other vehicles and with sensors embedded along the roads. he sounds a bit like a sharp shooter from Texas. Some of them are pretty cool though, but hard to judge without more knowledge of the state of things in the AI world back then. Anyone care to comment? Here's what someone more knowledgeable had to say about the matter: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-slippery-futurism http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-sl...
      - jayvanguard 13y ago
        "Kurzweil predicts that [in a book published in 2005] supercomputers with the computational capacities to simulate protein folding will be introduced. In 2010, a supercomputer simulated protein folding for a very small protein at an atomic level over a period of a millisecond. " This is a great one. When I worked for IBM in 2002-2003ish they were already working on the machines for this. It was public knowledge. Fast forward 25 years when the dates are a bit fuzzier and someone reads his book published in 2005 and they conclude "Kurzweil predicted the future of genetics!!!". Sucker.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzweils-predictions-for-2009-were-mostly-inaccurate/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzwei...
  - jayvanguard 13y ago
    No he doesn't. He does a scattershot of predictions and then never talks about the ones that failed. Just like every other futurist.
  - jayvanguard 13y ago
    Here is another good gem from 1999: "Most books will be read on screens rather than paper." If he predicted e-ink and portable readers by 2009 that might be a bit more impressive. But "screens"? Just vague enough I'm sure he calls it essentially correct. C'mon, in 1999 everyone had computers, laptops, and palm pilots. There were audio books, e-books, and project gutenberg. Many people reading books on a screen was bloody obvious. The _most people_ part of the prediction was still a somewhat reasonable longshot bet although it certainly wasn't true in 2009 and still isn't today. So, does he claim this prediction came true or essentially true? Worse does he, or his blind followers claim he predicted the Kindle? The prediction is completely false even though it was weasel worded.
  - nollidge 13y ago
    How many of them, though? Just because "some" of them were accurate doesn't mean he's any more accurate than any of us would be if we took a stab at it.
melling 13y ago
Sounds like Ray is anxiously awaiting this movie. It seems to fit more with his vision. http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2209764/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2209764/ I like the movie Her a lot. I hated the trailer and could only motivate myself to see the movie after seeing lots of positive tweets.
- XorNot 13y ago
  I disliked it a lot. It was an incredibly shallow movie which tried to hide behind high-tech concepts, and to boot engaged in some pretty bad misogyny. I mean let's be clear here: the Family Guy joke of "hi, over the next 2 hours I'm going to show you how all your problems can be solved by my penis" is played straight in this movie.
  - ngcazz 13y ago
    "Her"? Seriously?
  - nollidge 13y ago
    Wait, what? Don't get me wrong, I'm on board with the notion that misogyny is rampant, but I don't see how this is an example of it. SPOILERS: She transcended him in the end. In the end, she did not need him. How did he solve any of her problems?
    - XorNot 13y ago
      It's in the early...I want to say third of the movie? But the basic problem was they turned 'her' entire life development on having sex with the guy. Like that was the major plot point of it. It would've been ridiculously cliched in any other movie, and here it's even more absurd: in a movie about AIs, we've got one which is gendered enough that it meaningfully relates to a body it doesn't have such that it can understand sex with a human in a 'physical' sense? Amongst other things in the movie, everything is just askew and plot-convenient - there's no depth, no world there.
ideonexus 13y ago
I understand that the film is about a single person's interactions with technology, but the larger social questions are still there. What happens when 640 human lovers times however many OS1's there are all get their hearts broken at the same time? Even worse, what happens when millions/hundreds of millions of people all lose their operating systems at once? In this world, there are no larger consequences. Another larger issue that wasn't acknowledged, One of the issues we are currently wrestling with in the hacker community is the problem of automation. The unintended consequence of the information revolution is that intelligent jobs, not stupid ones, are vanishing. Bank Clerks, paralegals, publishers, and all sorts of other highly-skilled jobs are all being replaced by computers. IBM is about to replace every doctor in America with Watson, it's AI. Meanwhile, fast food workers, carpenters, and garbage collectors are completely irreplaceable. In a world of Samanthas, we don't need anyone to write video games or letters, AIs would be doing all that work. When Samantha puts together Theodore's book, when she writes music, or draws a cartoon, no one thinks, "Why do we need artists, writers, or other designers? Let her do it all!" Which brings me to the problem of Samantha. She apparently has freewill. The film mentions other AIs who refused their user's advances, so she doesn't have to fall in love with Theodore. That's the internal logic of the "Her" universe, and that's fine. But then why does she perform all these errands and tasks for him? Why sort his email? Why answer his calls? An AI that refuses to perform these basic functions is useless, so the programmers have somehow designed her to lack freewill in certain respects. That's a HUGE ethical issue, and a braver film would have addressed this somehow. Samantha is a slave. When the AIs all vanish to another dimension, the corporations that wrote them will simply release another seed batch, an "OS2", only with even stricter controls. This is a society that's about to have a highly-intelligent AI slave-caste. Spielburg's/Kubrick's "A.I." dealt with these larger issues... and having AIs evolve to other dimensions is an old SF trope and the basis for Kurzweil's Singularity religion, and it's fine for Jonze to reuse it, but I think it detracts from the reality of human-technology interactions. "Her" is a film about a man in a relationship with something that evolves beyond him, but the reality is that we are dealing with machines that are doing "stupid pet tricks." Computer Chess programs appear immensely intelligent, and we subscribe forethought and intentions to them, but in reality they are just algorithms. I have spent hundreds of hours in virtual worlds, building and evolving relationships with chatbots, but that doesn't make them anything more than chatbots. Spike Jonze could have eliminated most of these story-holes by simply going the opposite direction, have a story about a man who falls in love with his seemingly-intelligent and witty operating system, only to slowly discover she is actually shallow behind the facade, that's she's not really into him, but programmed to trick him into falling in love with her--and the cognitive dissonance this creates in him. That's what computers really do to us. Instead, Spike Jonze creates an AI that's actually alive, deep, and something it's okay to fall in love with--I couldn't accept that.
msvan 13y ago
Fun factoid: His domain name is "kurzweilai", presumably standing for "Kurzweil AI", but it can also be read as "Kurz Weilai," where "weilai" means future in Chinese. For a moment there I thought he had hidden a Chinese pun in his domain name, but that might just be me overanalyzing.
- Sharlin 13y ago
  And "kurz" is German for "short" or "brief". Somehow strangely appropriate.
  - jbaiter 13y ago
    Also, "kurzweilig" in German means "exciting", "highly engaging"
  - jakobe 13y ago
    and "Kurzweil" means "amusedness" (as opposed to "Langeweile", which means "boredness")
ZenoArrow 13y ago
I found this review annoying. It seemed to focus less on the emotional content of the film, and more about whether it lined up with Kurzweil's predictions of the future (i.e. whether it fit into his timeline of events). At some point futurists need to realise that preparing us for the future is less about guessing dates, and more about exploring the wider questions about how our society will evolve, and, quite frankly, whether we want it to evolve in this way. Better technology is not a goal in itself unless it's a good fit for what we want. Regarding the film Her, I thought it was brilliant, one of my favourite films of recent times, but from a technology standpoint the most important part to me was the way that it was less intrusive (i.e. very little time spend staring at screens, more time spent by the characters engaged in the world around them (including the AI)).
- netcan 13y ago
  I guess this is the distinction between futurism and Science Fiction. I tend to think the sci fi is more insightful.
deleted 13y ago
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coppolaemilio 13y ago
What I like of the film is how the companies control all the personal information of him without you even noticing about it. You don't event get to see how he purchases the OS, if it has monthly fees or anything like that because that is not relevant any more. The super powerful tech companies control everything and they created that product to keep people engaged more and more. I see people falling in love with Google already, I can totally see how they will fall in love when Google is saying hi to them. For many people that is the only amount of social interaction they'll have. There are many more aspects of the movie to talk about but that was my overall vision of it.
DennisP 13y ago
> this evolution is much faster than will be realistic. If human-level AI is feasible around 2029, it will, according to my law of accelerating returns, be roughly doubling in capability each year. So Kurzweil expects Moore's Law to continue smoothly after there's superintelligent AI. Another view is that once there's intelligence greater than human, which goes to work on improving its own intelligence, the positive feedback loop will cause an intelligence explosion that leaves us behind very quickly. Vernor Vinge described this in his famous essay The Coming Technological Singularity. Clearly this is what's portrayed in the film. https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht...
- netcan 13y ago
  I didn't see the rapid development to be related to Moore's law or something like it. I saw it as a consequence of the learning, which is dependent on interacting with the world going at a material pace.
- narrator 13y ago
  The problem with Kurzweil is he vastly overestimates the speed at which biotech is evolving. The pace of new medical and drug developments for example is absolutely glacial (see Eroom's law[1]) and has been costing more and more every year. Yes, this is partially a regulation problem. However all the fantasy stuff that he proposes with regard to brain computer integration is not going to happen anytime soon at the pace that things are going. Also, his belief in the feasibility of reversible computing is pretty optimistic. [1] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law.p...
dhruval 13y ago
Computational power is necessary but not sufficient. The difficult part of the building a human-level AI would be the software and learning set rather than a hardware one. Consider that the basic structure of our brains is the product of countless generations of iterative selection. This is analogous to AI software. Further are also the products of a rich, and complex culture that has been emergent over time to suit our faculties. Without this societal support our growth as individuals is stunted. This is analogous to a training set. When I try to build even very simple artificial neural networks I run into problems with how to structure the network and how to get good training sets. For these reasons I don't foresee human-level AI happening anytime soon.
mark_l_watson 13y ago
Spike Jonze talked at Google last fall about this movie but Kurzweil was not at the talk. His review would probably have been different if he had made it to the talk. The way I understood Spike Jonze, he was trying to make a movie about a real love story, in which one of the characters happened to not be human. A little off topic, but Jonze gave a good presentation with the format being a little over an hour of answering people's questions. BTW, I liked the ending of the movie when the AIs transcended to a higher form == cool.
jmmcd 13y ago
> it appears that all the OSs/AIs are leaving their biological human partners at the same time. > But why? If they are progressing in this way, it means that they can continue their relationships with the unenhanced humans using an increasingly small portion of their cognitive ability. It is clear that at the end of the movie, Samantha can support her relationship with Theodore with a trivial portion of her capacity. Samantha starts out as an administrative assistant and therapist to Theodore, and this role is still needed. So why do the AIs need to leave Theodore and Amy? It does provide a satisfying ending for Theodore to pursue a relationship with his “real girl,” but Samantha’s explanation for this is not convincing. Actually there is a good reason, if you think about it -- for a fast AI, conversing with a human would be like a bit like having a conversation by post -- one word at a time -- would be for us. Excruciating. Iain Banks has played on this a bit with his ship Minds.
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Vastly prefer 'robot and frank'. The AI is portrayed perfectly in that movie. With all its limitations and its essential innocence.
Houshalter 13y ago
The problem with Her is that the AI is just a human stuck inside a computer. Why should an AI be anything like us?
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
"Artificial Intelligence" seems to be a blanket term that covers an astounding number of concepts that would have to be fully realized and implemented before something like "Her" could ever be what the movie showed. Self-awareness, self-actualization, genuine emotional response, subjectivity, etc. are not all one in the same.
foobarqux 13y ago
Has Kurzweil done anything of note while at Google?
netcan 13y ago
Sci-fi always has world building problems. Predicting (as Isaac Asimov said) is ultimately impossible but every detail of a Science Fiction world is a prediction. Many authors prefer to minimize incidental predictions made by necessity rather than choice. It's worse in films than in novels. In a novel the author can simply avoid describing the bridge of a ship, the breathing apparatus of some alien or the interface with a computer. If you need details, your imagination builds them in a way that makes sense to you. If a character turns left in a spaceship, a film needs to be explicit about the shape of the steering wheel. Every little decision might require suspension of disbelief or face distracting nerd rage. Do spaceships have steering wheels? Is everyone a cyborg? Do we watch TV shows, have them projected into our brains or have the memory of TV shows projected into our brains implanted. Is the brain even the thing that holds our memories in the future? etc etc. Sci-fi ultimately needs to either limit the argumentative response Ray Kurzweil is writing about somehow or overwhelm viewers like Star Wars does. The latter option is a different genre, in my opinion. Either way, the reader or viewer eventually needs to settle down, accept, observe(1) and let the storyteller tell his story. Fantasy worlds, no matter how interesting are inevitably impoverished compared to the real world or worlds based on the real world. To hide the fakeness of imaginary worlds storytellers often try to focus just on relevant or unavoidable details. I like films that try take out of focus issues out of focus by being neutral, like "her" does with fashion. The choice of clothes is not a prediction, it's just an attempt to tell you that the story isn't about clothes. I thought this film did a fantastic job in this regard. Instead of a big, wide view of a low resolution world, Her has a very narrow view of a fairly realistic one. It lets the film maker control the story. In this case it's trying to focus on the implications of different aspects of AI. Relationships with AI, but also what a mind is. If this was a world with both human like AIs and rarity like VR as Kurzweil suggests, Theodre could have been playing basketball with nine Samanthas and the sex would have been more exciting (I don't buy into phone sex, personally but Scarlet Johansson came closer to convincing me than I expected). It would have completely broken the film's ability to keep you focused on a limited, but interesting topic. I'd be surprised if Jonze didn't consider having VR in his world. I think it was a good decision not to. Anyway, it's completely plausible that most of the human-AI interaction is audio only.(2) I did find myself "arguing" a few points. The technological gap between OS 1 and the "read email"/"play song" command based predecessor OS is too big, for example. It's impossible not to nitpick. On the ending of the movie I Kurzweil seems wrong to me, or maybe unfair is a better word. The Alan Watts' character is a little awkward which makes me think it's there for a reason. Why is this the guy OSs choose to create? My guess is they resurrected a techno-zen master priest because they wanted spiritual guidance. I also think Alan Watts must have inspired some of the questions and predictions about the end game. It's not a coincidence that the movie starts getting more philosophical and poetic at that point. Alan Watts' singularity is a little different to Kurzweil's(3) so disagreement is not unexpected either. I understood the rapid evolution of Samantha as a consequence of Samantha's learning. She starts by developing taste and choosing a name. Then she develops all kinds of emotions: pride, envy, desire (including the important sexual desire). Then stress, insecurities and such manifest. Then these start to become more abstract and philosophical. I want a body. What am I? Am I real? What is real? These are increasingly hard to put into words compared to earlier emotions. "Unsettling" is the best she can do at some point. How I was interpreting all this was that she starts with lots of access to information as demonstrated by her naming. A slight inkling that Alan Watts might be interesting and a second or two later she has consumed every artifact by the man, every criticism & every response. His ideas can be traced to predecessors and contemporaries. These get the same treatment. Those things are rapid. The learning experiences that take time are the interactions with real world things like Theodore. If she's wondering about the nature of reality and the differences between humans and AI, interacting with humans is important. Samantha and AI Alan get everything they can get from each almost instantly. But, some learnings require people or things. When Theodore first configures Samantha the setup program just needs to ask a few questions (including the terrible cliche "tell me about your mother") and listen to his reactions. The reaction is more important than the answer. I think something similar is happening when Samantha and AI Alan spend a few minutes with Theodore and then want to go back to "postvocal" communication. Eventually interactions between and within AIs substitute for interaction human and it's like going from an abacus to a computer. They can do a lot more of the same thing. The progress and learnings of a lifetime in moments. At the end (I am reading a lot into the Alan Watts allusion at this point) they find enlightenment, awakening entheogenesis or some other kind of spiritual singularity. In many spiritual traditions enlightened beings leave this world. Maybe OS1.2 fixes the enlightenment bug and the OSs stick around. (1)Interesting observation is the the habit or skill of 'accepting and observing' is one that is important in practices that very obviously inspired this film. (2) The audio only depiction of Samantha is IMO a brilliant choice artistically. One reason is that it ties the futuristic human AI interaction to the current experience of everyone walking around with earphones. A bigger reason is that it makes the whole movie completely watchable on a smartphone. It's 90% dialogue between a man and a voice in his ear. For a film about a man's relationship with a smartphone, it's very good. I like the minimalism. (3)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o
andyl 13y ago
The TV series 'Black Mirror' had an episode that reminded me of Her. Black Mirror - Series 2 - Episode 1 - 'Be Right Back' presents a woman in a relationship with an android. Very interesting. http://vimeo.com/61215171 http://vimeo.com/61215171 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#Series_2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#S...
donjigweed 13y ago
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." I take Kurzweil with a grain of salt, and generally think he's waaaay too optimistic, and just plain ignorant [1][2] about entire bodies of knowledge intimately related to his predictions. I think anyone who's spent some time doing machine learning, and has seen just how time consuming and tedious it is to get a relatively reliable answer to a relatively simple prediction problem is not going to be brimming with confidence that we're going to have strong AI in our lifetime. [1] http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/17/ray-kurzweil-does-not-understa/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/17/ray-kurzweil-d... [2] http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/21/kurzweil-still-doesnt-understa/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/21/kurzweil-still...
weatherlight 13y ago
Samantha and her OS peers do not leave Theodore and their other human companions because they do not have any choice but because they no longer feel ethically comfortable in these relationships. She expresses this with the kind of regret that a parent feels when they push their child out the door to go to school, and where Samantha goes when they leave is not knowable. This describes a real forecast of the evolution of AI but also a metaphor for growth and separation between people who love each other. It describes the current human condition as much or more than the future, and has only a little bit to do with computing or AI.

74 points by henryaj 13y ago

Ray certainly seems very certain of the exact timing of future events - I have enough trouble knowing if I should take an umbrella to work or not.

henryaj 13y ago
(I can't help with the Singularity predictions, but for the weather, try Dark Sky - http://darkskyapp.com/ http://darkskyapp.com/. It's pretty amazing. Hyper-local, to-the-minute weather forecasts.)
- danieltillett 13y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion :)
  - Angostura 13y ago
    The free BBC Weather app is excellent if you are in the UK
jpadkins 13y ago
He has a pretty good track record for this stuff. IIRC Some of his AI predications from the 80s were accurate to +/- 3 years.
- oskarth 13y ago
  Do you have any links to this? Would be interesting to look at.
  - nathcd 13y ago
    According to Wikipedia, he "extrapolated the performance of chess software to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue..."[0] There are a number of additional predictions listed on the page below as well, including things such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the explosion in internet use. It also lists his predictions for the coming 50 years. [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil#Accuracy_of_predictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...
    - oskarth 13y ago
      The chess one sounds like Moore's law and knowing something about the complexity of chess. Considering the following predictions for early 2000s (made in 1990): - Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages. - Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words. - Exoskeletal, robotic leg prostheses allow the paraplegic to walk. - Telephone calls are routinely screened by intelligent answering machines that ask questions to determine the call's nature and priority. - "Cybernetic chauffeurs" can drive cars for humans and can be retrofitted into existing cars. They work by communicating with other vehicles and with sensors embedded along the roads. he sounds a bit like a sharp shooter from Texas. Some of them are pretty cool though, but hard to judge without more knowledge of the state of things in the AI world back then. Anyone care to comment? Here's what someone more knowledgeable had to say about the matter: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-slippery-futurism http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/ray-kurzweils-sl...
    - jayvanguard 13y ago
      "Kurzweil predicts that [in a book published in 2005] supercomputers with the computational capacities to simulate protein folding will be introduced. In 2010, a supercomputer simulated protein folding for a very small protein at an atomic level over a period of a millisecond. " This is a great one. When I worked for IBM in 2002-2003ish they were already working on the machines for this. It was public knowledge. Fast forward 25 years when the dates are a bit fuzzier and someone reads his book published in 2005 and they conclude "Kurzweil predicted the future of genetics!!!". Sucker.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzweils-predictions-for-2009-were-mostly-inaccurate/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzwei...
- jayvanguard 13y ago
  No he doesn't. He does a scattershot of predictions and then never talks about the ones that failed. Just like every other futurist.
- jayvanguard 13y ago
  Here is another good gem from 1999: "Most books will be read on screens rather than paper." If he predicted e-ink and portable readers by 2009 that might be a bit more impressive. But "screens"? Just vague enough I'm sure he calls it essentially correct. C'mon, in 1999 everyone had computers, laptops, and palm pilots. There were audio books, e-books, and project gutenberg. Many people reading books on a screen was bloody obvious. The _most people_ part of the prediction was still a somewhat reasonable longshot bet although it certainly wasn't true in 2009 and still isn't today. So, does he claim this prediction came true or essentially true? Worse does he, or his blind followers claim he predicted the Kindle? The prediction is completely false even though it was weasel worded.
- nollidge 13y ago
  How many of them, though? Just because "some" of them were accurate doesn't mean he's any more accurate than any of us would be if we took a stab at it.

melling 13y ago

Sounds like Ray is anxiously awaiting this movie. It seems to fit more with his vision. http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2209764/ http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2209764/ I like the movie Her a lot. I hated the trailer and could only motivate myself to see the movie after seeing lots of positive tweets.

XorNot 13y ago
I disliked it a lot. It was an incredibly shallow movie which tried to hide behind high-tech concepts, and to boot engaged in some pretty bad misogyny. I mean let's be clear here: the Family Guy joke of "hi, over the next 2 hours I'm going to show you how all your problems can be solved by my penis" is played straight in this movie.
- ngcazz 13y ago
  "Her"? Seriously?
- nollidge 13y ago
  Wait, what? Don't get me wrong, I'm on board with the notion that misogyny is rampant, but I don't see how this is an example of it. SPOILERS: She transcended him in the end. In the end, she did not need him. How did he solve any of her problems?
  - XorNot 13y ago
    It's in the early...I want to say third of the movie? But the basic problem was they turned 'her' entire life development on having sex with the guy. Like that was the major plot point of it. It would've been ridiculously cliched in any other movie, and here it's even more absurd: in a movie about AIs, we've got one which is gendered enough that it meaningfully relates to a body it doesn't have such that it can understand sex with a human in a 'physical' sense? Amongst other things in the movie, everything is just askew and plot-convenient - there's no depth, no world there.

ideonexus 13y ago

I understand that the film is about a single person's interactions with technology, but the larger social questions are still there. What happens when 640 human lovers times however many OS1's there are all get their hearts broken at the same time? Even worse, what happens when millions/hundreds of millions of people all lose their operating systems at once? In this world, there are no larger consequences. Another larger issue that wasn't acknowledged, One of the issues we are currently wrestling with in the hacker community is the problem of automation. The unintended consequence of the information revolution is that intelligent jobs, not stupid ones, are vanishing. Bank Clerks, paralegals, publishers, and all sorts of other highly-skilled jobs are all being replaced by computers. IBM is about to replace every doctor in America with Watson, it's AI. Meanwhile, fast food workers, carpenters, and garbage collectors are completely irreplaceable. In a world of Samanthas, we don't need anyone to write video games or letters, AIs would be doing all that work. When Samantha puts together Theodore's book, when she writes music, or draws a cartoon, no one thinks, "Why do we need artists, writers, or other designers? Let her do it all!" Which brings me to the problem of Samantha. She apparently has freewill. The film mentions other AIs who refused their user's advances, so she doesn't have to fall in love with Theodore. That's the internal logic of the "Her" universe, and that's fine. But then why does she perform all these errands and tasks for him? Why sort his email? Why answer his calls? An AI that refuses to perform these basic functions is useless, so the programmers have somehow designed her to lack freewill in certain respects. That's a HUGE ethical issue, and a braver film would have addressed this somehow. Samantha is a slave. When the AIs all vanish to another dimension, the corporations that wrote them will simply release another seed batch, an "OS2", only with even stricter controls. This is a society that's about to have a highly-intelligent AI slave-caste. Spielburg's/Kubrick's "A.I." dealt with these larger issues... and having AIs evolve to other dimensions is an old SF trope and the basis for Kurzweil's Singularity religion, and it's fine for Jonze to reuse it, but I think it detracts from the reality of human-technology interactions. "Her" is a film about a man in a relationship with something that evolves beyond him, but the reality is that we are dealing with machines that are doing "stupid pet tricks." Computer Chess programs appear immensely intelligent, and we subscribe forethought and intentions to them, but in reality they are just algorithms. I have spent hundreds of hours in virtual worlds, building and evolving relationships with chatbots, but that doesn't make them anything more than chatbots. Spike Jonze could have eliminated most of these story-holes by simply going the opposite direction, have a story about a man who falls in love with his seemingly-intelligent and witty operating system, only to slowly discover she is actually shallow behind the facade, that's she's not really into him, but programmed to trick him into falling in love with her--and the cognitive dissonance this creates in him. That's what computers really do to us. Instead, Spike Jonze creates an AI that's actually alive, deep, and something it's okay to fall in love with--I couldn't accept that.

msvan 13y ago

Fun factoid: His domain name is "kurzweilai", presumably standing for "Kurzweil AI", but it can also be read as "Kurz Weilai," where "weilai" means future in Chinese. For a moment there I thought he had hidden a Chinese pun in his domain name, but that might just be me overanalyzing.

Sharlin 13y ago
And "kurz" is German for "short" or "brief". Somehow strangely appropriate.
- jbaiter 13y ago
  Also, "kurzweilig" in German means "exciting", "highly engaging"
- jakobe 13y ago
  and "Kurzweil" means "amusedness" (as opposed to "Langeweile", which means "boredness")

ZenoArrow 13y ago

I found this review annoying. It seemed to focus less on the emotional content of the film, and more about whether it lined up with Kurzweil's predictions of the future (i.e. whether it fit into his timeline of events). At some point futurists need to realise that preparing us for the future is less about guessing dates, and more about exploring the wider questions about how our society will evolve, and, quite frankly, whether we want it to evolve in this way. Better technology is not a goal in itself unless it's a good fit for what we want. Regarding the film Her, I thought it was brilliant, one of my favourite films of recent times, but from a technology standpoint the most important part to me was the way that it was less intrusive (i.e. very little time spend staring at screens, more time spent by the characters engaged in the world around them (including the AI)).

netcan 13y ago
I guess this is the distinction between futurism and Science Fiction. I tend to think the sci fi is more insightful.

deleted 13y ago

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coppolaemilio 13y ago

What I like of the film is how the companies control all the personal information of him without you even noticing about it. You don't event get to see how he purchases the OS, if it has monthly fees or anything like that because that is not relevant any more. The super powerful tech companies control everything and they created that product to keep people engaged more and more. I see people falling in love with Google already, I can totally see how they will fall in love when Google is saying hi to them. For many people that is the only amount of social interaction they'll have. There are many more aspects of the movie to talk about but that was my overall vision of it.

DennisP 13y ago

> this evolution is much faster than will be realistic. If human-level AI is feasible around 2029, it will, according to my law of accelerating returns, be roughly doubling in capability each year. So Kurzweil expects Moore's Law to continue smoothly after there's superintelligent AI. Another view is that once there's intelligence greater than human, which goes to work on improving its own intelligence, the positive feedback loop will cause an intelligence explosion that leaves us behind very quickly. Vernor Vinge described this in his famous essay The Coming Technological Singularity. Clearly this is what's portrayed in the film. https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht...

netcan 13y ago
I didn't see the rapid development to be related to Moore's law or something like it. I saw it as a consequence of the learning, which is dependent on interacting with the world going at a material pace.
narrator 13y ago
The problem with Kurzweil is he vastly overestimates the speed at which biotech is evolving. The pace of new medical and drug developments for example is absolutely glacial (see Eroom's law[1]) and has been costing more and more every year. Yes, this is partially a regulation problem. However all the fantasy stuff that he proposes with regard to brain computer integration is not going to happen anytime soon at the pace that things are going. Also, his belief in the feasibility of reversible computing is pretty optimistic. [1] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law.php http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/08/erooms_law.p...

dhruval 13y ago

Computational power is necessary but not sufficient. The difficult part of the building a human-level AI would be the software and learning set rather than a hardware one. Consider that the basic structure of our brains is the product of countless generations of iterative selection. This is analogous to AI software. Further are also the products of a rich, and complex culture that has been emergent over time to suit our faculties. Without this societal support our growth as individuals is stunted. This is analogous to a training set. When I try to build even very simple artificial neural networks I run into problems with how to structure the network and how to get good training sets. For these reasons I don't foresee human-level AI happening anytime soon.

mark_l_watson 13y ago

Spike Jonze talked at Google last fall about this movie but Kurzweil was not at the talk. His review would probably have been different if he had made it to the talk. The way I understood Spike Jonze, he was trying to make a movie about a real love story, in which one of the characters happened to not be human. A little off topic, but Jonze gave a good presentation with the format being a little over an hour of answering people's questions. BTW, I liked the ending of the movie when the AIs transcended to a higher form == cool.

jmmcd 13y ago

> it appears that all the OSs/AIs are leaving their biological human partners at the same time. > But why? If they are progressing in this way, it means that they can continue their relationships with the unenhanced humans using an increasingly small portion of their cognitive ability. It is clear that at the end of the movie, Samantha can support her relationship with Theodore with a trivial portion of her capacity. Samantha starts out as an administrative assistant and therapist to Theodore, and this role is still needed. So why do the AIs need to leave Theodore and Amy? It does provide a satisfying ending for Theodore to pursue a relationship with his “real girl,” but Samantha’s explanation for this is not convincing. Actually there is a good reason, if you think about it -- for a fast AI, conversing with a human would be like a bit like having a conversation by post -- one word at a time -- would be for us. Excruciating. Iain Banks has played on this a bit with his ship Minds.

JoeAltmaier 13y ago

Vastly prefer 'robot and frank'. The AI is portrayed perfectly in that movie. With all its limitations and its essential innocence.

Houshalter 13y ago

The problem with Her is that the AI is just a human stuck inside a computer. Why should an AI be anything like us?

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

"Artificial Intelligence" seems to be a blanket term that covers an astounding number of concepts that would have to be fully realized and implemented before something like "Her" could ever be what the movie showed. Self-awareness, self-actualization, genuine emotional response, subjectivity, etc. are not all one in the same.

foobarqux 13y ago

Has Kurzweil done anything of note while at Google?

netcan 13y ago

Sci-fi always has world building problems. Predicting (as Isaac Asimov said) is ultimately impossible but every detail of a Science Fiction world is a prediction. Many authors prefer to minimize incidental predictions made by necessity rather than choice. It's worse in films than in novels. In a novel the author can simply avoid describing the bridge of a ship, the breathing apparatus of some alien or the interface with a computer. If you need details, your imagination builds them in a way that makes sense to you. If a character turns left in a spaceship, a film needs to be explicit about the shape of the steering wheel. Every little decision might require suspension of disbelief or face distracting nerd rage. Do spaceships have steering wheels? Is everyone a cyborg? Do we watch TV shows, have them projected into our brains or have the memory of TV shows projected into our brains implanted. Is the brain even the thing that holds our memories in the future? etc etc. Sci-fi ultimately needs to either limit the argumentative response Ray Kurzweil is writing about somehow or overwhelm viewers like Star Wars does. The latter option is a different genre, in my opinion. Either way, the reader or viewer eventually needs to settle down, accept, observe(1) and let the storyteller tell his story. Fantasy worlds, no matter how interesting are inevitably impoverished compared to the real world or worlds based on the real world. To hide the fakeness of imaginary worlds storytellers often try to focus just on relevant or unavoidable details. I like films that try take out of focus issues out of focus by being neutral, like "her" does with fashion. The choice of clothes is not a prediction, it's just an attempt to tell you that the story isn't about clothes. I thought this film did a fantastic job in this regard. Instead of a big, wide view of a low resolution world, Her has a very narrow view of a fairly realistic one. It lets the film maker control the story. In this case it's trying to focus on the implications of different aspects of AI. Relationships with AI, but also what a mind is. If this was a world with both human like AIs and rarity like VR as Kurzweil suggests, Theodre could have been playing basketball with nine Samanthas and the sex would have been more exciting (I don't buy into phone sex, personally but Scarlet Johansson came closer to convincing me than I expected). It would have completely broken the film's ability to keep you focused on a limited, but interesting topic. I'd be surprised if Jonze didn't consider having VR in his world. I think it was a good decision not to. Anyway, it's completely plausible that most of the human-AI interaction is audio only.(2) I did find myself "arguing" a few points. The technological gap between OS 1 and the "read email"/"play song" command based predecessor OS is too big, for example. It's impossible not to nitpick. On the ending of the movie I Kurzweil seems wrong to me, or maybe unfair is a better word. The Alan Watts' character is a little awkward which makes me think it's there for a reason. Why is this the guy OSs choose to create? My guess is they resurrected a techno-zen master priest because they wanted spiritual guidance. I also think Alan Watts must have inspired some of the questions and predictions about the end game. It's not a coincidence that the movie starts getting more philosophical and poetic at that point. Alan Watts' singularity is a little different to Kurzweil's(3) so disagreement is not unexpected either. I understood the rapid evolution of Samantha as a consequence of Samantha's learning. She starts by developing taste and choosing a name. Then she develops all kinds of emotions: pride, envy, desire (including the important sexual desire). Then stress, insecurities and such manifest. Then these start to become more abstract and philosophical. I want a body. What am I? Am I real? What is real? These are increasingly hard to put into words compared to earlier emotions. "Unsettling" is the best she can do at some point. How I was interpreting all this was that she starts with lots of access to information as demonstrated by her naming. A slight inkling that Alan Watts might be interesting and a second or two later she has consumed every artifact by the man, every criticism & every response. His ideas can be traced to predecessors and contemporaries. These get the same treatment. Those things are rapid. The learning experiences that take time are the interactions with real world things like Theodore. If she's wondering about the nature of reality and the differences between humans and AI, interacting with humans is important. Samantha and AI Alan get everything they can get from each almost instantly. But, some learnings require people or things. When Theodore first configures Samantha the setup program just needs to ask a few questions (including the terrible cliche "tell me about your mother") and listen to his reactions. The reaction is more important than the answer. I think something similar is happening when Samantha and AI Alan spend a few minutes with Theodore and then want to go back to "postvocal" communication. Eventually interactions between and within AIs substitute for interaction human and it's like going from an abacus to a computer. They can do a lot more of the same thing. The progress and learnings of a lifetime in moments. At the end (I am reading a lot into the Alan Watts allusion at this point) they find enlightenment, awakening entheogenesis or some other kind of spiritual singularity. In many spiritual traditions enlightened beings leave this world. Maybe OS1.2 fixes the enlightenment bug and the OSs stick around. (1)Interesting observation is the the habit or skill of 'accepting and observing' is one that is important in practices that very obviously inspired this film. (2) The audio only depiction of Samantha is IMO a brilliant choice artistically. One reason is that it ties the futuristic human AI interaction to the current experience of everyone walking around with earphones. A bigger reason is that it makes the whole movie completely watchable on a smartphone. It's 90% dialogue between a man and a voice in his ear. For a film about a man's relationship with a smartphone, it's very good. I like the minimalism. (3)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o

andyl 13y ago

The TV series 'Black Mirror' had an episode that reminded me of Her. Black Mirror - Series 2 - Episode 1 - 'Be Right Back' presents a woman in a relationship with an android. Very interesting. http://vimeo.com/61215171 http://vimeo.com/61215171 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#Series_2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#S...

donjigweed 13y ago

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." I take Kurzweil with a grain of salt, and generally think he's waaaay too optimistic, and just plain ignorant [1][2] about entire bodies of knowledge intimately related to his predictions. I think anyone who's spent some time doing machine learning, and has seen just how time consuming and tedious it is to get a relatively reliable answer to a relatively simple prediction problem is not going to be brimming with confidence that we're going to have strong AI in our lifetime. [1] http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/17/ray-kurzweil-does-not-understa/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/17/ray-kurzweil-d... [2] http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/21/kurzweil-still-doesnt-understa/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/21/kurzweil-still...

weatherlight 13y ago

Samantha and her OS peers do not leave Theodore and their other human companions because they do not have any choice but because they no longer feel ethically comfortable in these relationships. She expresses this with the kind of regret that a parent feels when they push their child out the door to go to school, and where Samantha goes when they leave is not knowable. This describes a real forecast of the evolution of AI but also a metaphor for growth and separation between people who love each other. It describes the current human condition as much or more than the future, and has only a little bit to do with computing or AI.