Movie: Her

If like me you're tired of movies with big rumbly robots shooting at each other, may I humbly recommend the new Spike Jonze movie.

In a nutshell (as you've no doubt heard) it's about a guy who falls in love with the Artificial Intelligence inside his computer.  The story takes place in the near future when AI and technology have advanced to the point where an AI could not only pass the Turing Test, but ace it.  Everyone talks to their AIs (which for some reason are equated with OSes in this movie) and quite a few fall in love.  The implication is that human-to-human love is just one option, and OS-human love is equally accepted.

The couple go through the usual growing pains of getting to know one another, fall in love, pledge commitment and inevitably drift apart.  It's a standard love story; just one of the partners is incorporeal.

In a few years this movie may seem either impossibly naive, or eerily prescient.  Hard to tell which.

Anyway it was a soothing and intellectually stimulating respite from the overloud shoot-em-ups.

From your friendly Cinema Curmudgeon.: Here's another new movie I will never see.

The basis of the story - a man falling in love with a piece of software - is ridiculous. One can only think that the man has some serious mental and emotional problems.

Now, it may be a well-written, well-performed movie. It may be a moving love story. But I am sick, sick, sick of computers being used in television and movies in magical manners. Computers, as far as I am concerned, are tools. Nothing more. The concept of this movie makes as much sense as a man falling in love with a 3/8-drive torque wrench.

So totally looking forward to this one. I'm a little concerned because 'Where the Wild Things Are' was to me unbearably dull. However I enjoyed 'Being John Malkovich' and 'Adaptation'. Love any script that has artificial intelligence as subject. Looks fascinating. Theres hope for love in my life yet. ;-)

I don't understand your post, SAI. The movies you mention have nothing to do with artificial intelligence.

Heh... true. It was a separate sentence though... not meant to suggest those movies has AI as a subject. [taken in isolation from previous sentence]. I know my writing needs work too. The hope for love in my life sentence should also be taken as a separate thought, just fyi. ;-)

_Howard wrote:

The concept of this movie makes as much sense as a man falling in love with a 3/8-drive torque wrench.

If ... somehow ... a 3/8" torque wrench could develop intelligence to the point that a normal, well-adjusted human being could mistake the torque wrench for a caring, feeling, compassionate sentient being, then ... well ... I guess your statement could make sense.

Oh and by the way? The concept has basically been filmed before, though not so sensitively.

_Howard wrote:

I don't understand your  post, SAI. The movies you mention have nothing to do with artificial intelligence.

They're all Spike Jonze movies. In fact they're all of the feature length movies he's done previously.

NoCoPilot wrote:

If ... somehow ... a 3/8" torque wrench could develop intelligence...

And there's the problem. A computer program has no intelligence. It follows directions. Period.

But on the other hand, the 3/8"-drive torque wrench has more going for it than the program. You can touch it, caress it, even take pictures of it. Maybe I do have feelings for my 3/8"-drive torque wrench (the 1/4"-inch drive is childish and the 1/2"-drive is too butch).

Too bad they didn't give the AI character a speech impediment, it would have made for a great inside joke. At its inception, the name of the favored programming language for artificial intelligence was Lisp.

_Howard wrote:

A computer program has no intelligence. It follows directions. Period.

Well yeah, TODAY.

Look at what the entertainment industry offers up as artificial intelligence: They add in emotions, many of which are biologically instituted in the human species.

Even assuming that someday scientists figure out just how the human brain works, the amount of computing power required to perfectly simulate a human does not currently exist. Perhaps someday in the far future they will achieve the incredibly difficult task of creating a quantum computer. Then, and only then, should it be considered possible to simulate the human brain.

Yours, or mine?

But seriously folks... the idea that human intelligence is beyond the capability of a computer, an advanced computer, to simulate is sheer religious sophistry. It is just circuit density and multi-threading (I believe) that separates OS-X from OS-U. It's not only likely but inevitable in my view that eventually, and not too far in the future, AIs will equal human processing power and then exceed it.

Will they then acquire self-consciousness? Will they develop personalities and quirks and a reverence for life and fear of death? Only if you believe those things are natural and not God-given. Only if you believe in emergent complexity. Only if you're a rational human being, composed of some hundred billion digital switches.

We're 1% of the way there -- though of course interconnectivity is at least as important as circuit density.

Coincidentally... I recently bought an old (1983) SF anthology called "Machines That Think" (so I could get a copy of "A Logic Named Joe"). Asimov's introduction and comments throughout are very apropos to our discussion. For instance:

Quote :

Does man have an ethical responsibility to this new form of intelligence he is evolving? Manufacturers of today's industrial robots need never even ask the question since their robots, mere mechanical arms directed by a computer program, seem no more than rather sophisticated and flexible machines. But, taking a quantum leap in the future, one realizes that this is a question that will eventually have to be faced. The Three Laws of Robotics, protecting humans from the possibility of robot destruction, will need an analogous version that protects robots against destructive humans.

NoCoPilot wrote:

But seriously folks... the idea that human intelligence is beyond the capability of a computer, an advanced computer, to simulate is sheer religious sophistry.  It is just circuit density and multi-threading (I believe) that separates OS-X from OS-U.  It's not only likely but inevitable in my view that eventually, and not too far in the future, AIs will equal human processing power and then exceed it.

If you equate human intelligence to simple computational speed, then the computers have already won. And please, please, please don't accuse me of religious sophistry. Pick another kind of sophistry, if you must, but - for God's sake   - not religious sophistry.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Will they then acquire self-consciousness?  Will they develop personalities and quirks and a reverence for life and fear of death?  Only if you believe those things are natural and not God-given.  Only if you believe in emergent complexity.  Only if you're a rational human being, composed of some hundred billion digital switches.

To believe something is natural in the biological world does not mean you must assume that it can be replicated in hardware or else you are a Goddie. It merely means that you are capable of differentiation.

Okay so tell me, Mr. Non-Religious Sophist, this part of the human personality that does not reside in the brain, where *DOES* it reside?

I did NOT say that the personality does not reside in the human brain. I said that the term is not applicable to a piece of machinery.

...Because???

Because it is a piece of machinery. It is operating from a set of instructions. It does what it has been told to do. Even with self-modifying code, it's still a fucking machine.

Wrong.  Read up on emergent complexity.

Anderson wrote:

"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts."

Saying a (future) supercomputer is just a machine is like saying a tornado is just some wind.

I am familiar with emergence.

And in my opinion, a tornado is just some wind (although a very specific type of wind), and
a (future) supercomputer is just a machine (although significantly more complex than a lever).

There's a story told in evolution textbooks. I don't remember all the details but the gist of he story is this.

There's a beetle (or an ant?) in Africa which drags leaves into its nest to be chewed up for food. The leaf has to be oriented point-first to be pulled into the nest.

When the beetle reaches the nest, it drops the leaf and checks the entrance of the nest.

If a researcher picks up the leaf, when the beetle drops it, and turns it end for end while the beetle is checking the nest, the beetle will turn the leaf and then check the nest again.

If the researcher swaps the leaf again, the beetle checks the nest again.

No matter how many times the researcher reorients the leaf, the beetle will ALWAYS check the nest after turning it around.

So...

Do you doubt that the difference between the beetle's brain and that of the researcher is simply one of complexity?

It would seem that the researcher has more free time than the beetle.  

The beetle is the present day computer. Follows instructions or instincts without variance. No feedback loops, no learning, no self-reprogramming.

Some computers today have feedback loops, learning, and self-reprogramming.

The fact that (most) people have more intelligence than beetles does not mean that man can create a form of life. The religious folks think that their gods did that. I believe that only natural forces can do that.

If it's man-made hardware and software, it's a machine. Nothing more. The machine may be able to communicate in a manner similar to a  human, but that does make it sentient.

_Howard wrote:

The fact that (most) people have more intelligence than beetles does not mean that man can create a form of life. The religious folks think that their gods did that. I believe that only natural forces can do that.

i would encourage you to expand on this.

I suspect, as you work through it, you'll find it's unsupportable.