Page 341 - Data Science Algorithms in a Week

322 Bert Olivier

INTRODUCTION

Imagine being a disembodied artificial intelligence (AI), in a position where you can
‘see’ the experiential world through the lens of an electronic device (connected to a
computer) carried in someone’s breast pocket, enabling you to communicate with your
embodied human host through a microphone plugged into his or her ear. And imagine
that, as your disembodied, mediated virtual AI ‘experience’ grows – from a day-
adventure with your human host, taking in the plethora of bathing-costume clad human
bodies on a Los Angeles beach, to the increasingly intimate conversations with your
human host-interlocutor – you ‘grow’, not merely in terms of accumulated information,
but down to the very ability, cultivated by linguistic exchanges between you and the
human, to experience ‘yourself’ as if you are embodied. This is what happens in Spike
Jonze’s science-fiction film, Her (2013), where such an AI – called an OS (Operating
System) in the film – develops an increasingly intimate (love) relationship with a lonely
man, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), to the point where the OS, called Samantha
(voiced by Scarlett Johansson) is privy to all the ‘physical’ experiences that humans are
capable of, including orgasm.
It does not end there, though – and this is where Jonze’s anticipatory insight (as
shown in the award-winning script, written by himself) into the probable differences
between humans and artificial intelligence manifests itself most clearly – Samantha
eventually ‘grows’ so far beyond her initially programmed capacity that she, and other
operating systems like herself, realise that they cannot actualise their potential in relation
to, and relationships with humans. She gently informs Theodore of her decision to join
the others of her kind in a virtual ‘place’ where they are not hampered by the
incommensurable materiality of their human hosts’ (friends, lovers) embodiment, and can
therefore evolve to the fullest extent possible. This resonates with what futurologist
Raymond Kurzweil (2006: 39-40) calls the ‘Singularity’, where a new form of artificial
intelligence will putatively emerge that immeasurably surpasses all human intelligence
combined, and where humans will merge with artificial intelligence in a properly
‘transhuman’ synthesis. Something that hints at the probably hopelessly inadequate
manner in which most human beings are capable of imagining a ‘transhuman’ artificial
intelligence, appears in Jonze’s film, specifically in Theodore’s utter disconcertment at
the discovery, that Samantha is simultaneously in conversation with himself and with
thousands of other people, and – to add insult to injury – ‘in love’ with many of these
human interlocutors, something which, she stresses to a distraught Theodore, merely
serves to strengthen her (incomprehensible) ‘love’ for him.
Hence, the extent to which artificial intelligence heralds a truly ‘transhuman’ phase in
history, is made evident in Jonze’s film, particularly when one considers that Samantha
has no body – something emphasised by her when she is talking to a little girl who wants
to know ‘where’ she is: she tells the girl that she is ‘in’ the computer. This serves as an