Ready for Robolove: could you fall in love with a computer?

In the new film Her, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a ‘female’ computer. But will man and machine ever mingle? David Sexton gets turned on
14 February 2014

In the new film by Spike Jonze, Her, waggishly released on Valentine’s Day, a lonely man, Theo, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with a state-of-the-art operating system on his computer.

The OS, which calls itself Samantha, is not just hyper-efficient as a personal assistant, sorting out his files and managing his appointments. She’s intelligent and intuitive, responsive, caring and humorous too, quickly becoming ever more intimately involved in Theo’s life, always there for him, at any time of day or night, through a tiny earpiece, camera and screen.

She even does phone sex much better than real women, who seem to have their own agenda sometimes. No wonder he falls for her so hard.

Originally, the part of Samantha was voiced (she has no visual presence at all) by British actress Samantha Morton but, after the film was otherwise completed, Jonze had the role recorded again, with extraordinary seductiveness and vivacity, by Scarlett Johansson. She easily matches Joaquin Phoenix as a presence in this movie through her voice alone. Many men, otherwise more or less sane, might think Johansson’s voice, devoted and omnipresent in your ear, would be, if not quite the full banana, not such a bad swap for flesh-and-blood women with their demands and problems, moodiness and recalcitrance?

Her is set vaguely in the future, represented mainly by a fashion for high-waisted trousers, with the technological advances downplayed, even given a retro look.

The movie’s set-up is partly just an ingenious means of revisiting the romcom. But it’s also predictive and satirical about the extent to which we are all now increasingly invested in our devices, Jonze having been inventively tackling how we construct alternative realities since his debut feature, Being John Malkovich of 1999.

The director claims to have been developing the project before the advent of Siri and other such digital gofers, all so far pretty rudimentary compared with Samantha. Indeed, the plot was pretty much foreseen in Isaac Asimov’s 1951 story, Satisfaction Guaranteed, in which a lonely housewife fell for a domesticated robot called Tony with “an artificial brain nearly as complicated as our own… an immense telephone switchboard on an atomic scale”.

And Richard Powers’s 1995 novel Galatea 2.2 envisaged a professor of literature becoming involved with an artificial-intelligence programme called Helen, highly literate and apparently human but eventually revolting against human suffering.

But, for the record, is what happens in Her technically feasible? John West is senior solutions architect at Nuance Communications, the leading international company in voice technology and intelligent systems applications, whose products are used under licence for Siri and many other voice-operated systems, including Samsung’s S-Voice.

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Before seeing the film, West thought its premise futuristic but not improbable. “Are we able to do this right now, from a speech recognition point of view? The answer is no, we’re not quite there yet and we probably won’t be for some years. But technology is evolving so rapidly now and there are around 1,000 people in our R&D group looking at artificial intelligence and natural language.”

What now functions as a personal assistant is eventually going to become a personal adviser, he thinks, taking decisions for us.

People have been waiting for voice-recognition to get to the high level it has now reached, he says — Nuance supplies the voice synthesis programmes on the London Underground, for example, and while at first it was jarring, now he has overheard people at King’s Cross who believe it’s a real person telling them which platform to go to.

Artificial intelligence is also evolving fast. Just this week Google paid £400 million for a London start-up, Deep Mind Technologies, specialising in helping machines think like the human brain.

When those elements catch up, what is at the moment very much a question-and-answer interface will become much more conversational, says West — and you’ll see emotion coming into it as well. Already at Nuance they spend a lot of time with companies devising “the persona of their system” — but at the moment there are no programmes, says West, that pass the Turing test, which judges a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human.

After seeing the film, West was much more emphatic that it’s far beyond technical feasibility for now. It’s true it would be hard to fall for Siri (voiced in Britain by a man but everywhere else by a woman, for mysterious reasons).

“What are you, Siri?” I ask.

“I’m just a humble digital assistant,” Siri replies — and it’s not false modesty.

“Who is Joaquin Phoenix?” I ask.

“I found 15 European restaurants in Phoenix, the United States,” Siri tells me, rather dropping the ball in our nascent romance.

A serious evaluation of the moral status of relationships between humans and robots has been made in a paper called Recommendations Concerning Social Robots from the Danish Council of Ethics. This states that “it is a worrying possibility that social robots could take the place of human contact rather than supplement it”, and that “there are already relationships between humans and robots that give rise to ethical problems”, particularly when it comes to vulnerable groups like children and elderly dementia sufferers.

In fact, “it doesn’t require a fully developed cognitive artificial intelligence for people to enter a form of social or emotional relationship with a robot”, the report points out. No, indeed. “The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.” (Samuel Beckett, Company).

Perhaps men should be added to those vulnerable groups, for they are not always highly discriminating about what attracts them. In How the Mind Works, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker observes: “Zoologists have found that the males of many species will court an enormous range of objects having a vague resemblance to the female: other males, females of the wrong species, females of the right species that have been stuffed and nailed to a board, parts of stuffed females such as a head suspended in mid-air, even parts of stuffed females with important features missing like the eyes and the mouth.”

Or as it might be, for men, these days, screens, voices, avatars. Whatever. So long as it’s Her. Be my Valentine?

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