Stick to your own species (a short review of "Her")

Given the sudden surge of interest in how close we may be to creating a true Artificial General Intelligence, I thought I would finally get around to watching the well reviewed 2013 science fiction movie "Her".   

I don't think it's giving anything away to explain that the plot is all about a lonely, just divorced guy falling in love with the AGI personality that is his computer's new operating system.  But to continue the review, I will get well and truly into SPOILER territory.

 

The relationship is purely verbal - there's no downloading of the intelligence into any type of robotic physical form, as I thought might be on the cards.   There is sex though - of the masturbatory kind (oddly, on both sides - which I find an odd concept for a non physical entity.)   

Being set in the future, it's not as if the fact of a man having a "relationship" with his software is even played as anything unusual - he confesses to his old college (physical, female) friend that the person he's been seeing is his operating system, and she shrugs it off, and confirms she knows other people dating their AI too.   The AI girlfriend also goes on a group date with two of his (physical) buddies - the three of them listen to the AI on wireless earphones, and converse with her.

The end result is - a remarkably inert story in which watching a man having conversations with a disembodied intelligence takes up about 90% of the movie, and very little else happens.

The relationship ends with his AI evolving past a relationship with a mere human mind, and running off with a more sophisticated AI created by another group - one based on the quasi Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts!   They both run away together into some sort of higher level of reality - a kind of running away to be with a better lover in the Noosphere. 

I thought that this was a credible, slightly amusing, idea for a science fiction story: but if you ask me, it's really only got enough meat on it for something like a 30 minute Twilight Zone episode, rather than a movie running over 2 hours.

For this reason, I can't recommend it.   Too little content drawn out too painfully slowly, if you ask me.