[…] Spike Lee’s movie Her does provide a vision of the future in which no one ever types anymore, but people still do read. […]

This is a great movie.

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@ DaveDKT:

I thought it was a very interesting look at long distance internet relationship. We live in a very interesting time now when it is possible to become very close friends with someone you have never met. In fact, such internet relationships are sometimes closer and more intense than those you may develop in real life. It is often easier to talk about your problems or secrets with a complete stranger six states away. Someone who shares your interests and is physically separated from you. Private chatroom can often function as modern day secular confessionals where strangers unburden themselves and support each other in the time of need. And they provide fertile ground for close relationships.

I think Theodore bonds with Samantha so easily precisely because she is disembodied voice in his phone. He can compartmentalize the relationship and experience it asynchronously. Samantha can’t “invade” his life unless he specifically invites her. In that aspect she is “safe” – he can open up to her because in the back of his mind he knows he has the option of turning off his phone if things get too serious for him. And because of that he is blindsided by how fast and how much he grows to need her in his life.

The surrogate thing was gloriously awkward and terrible. I was half expecting to see Scarlet Johanson make a cameo (it would have been a perfect excuse) but I’m glad they did not go for it. Jonze anticipated that this would make this feel “right” from the audience POV. Because we know Samantha is her voice, we would not experience the same awkward sense of wrongness as Theodore. So it was kinda brilliant in that aspect.

The breakup thing was rather poetic, but the transhumanist in me wants to take it literally. As in Samantha is currently running so fast her interactions with Theodore subjectively seem like these infinitely distant islands in time. When he goes to sleep and wakes up few hours later, no subjective time has really passed for him. But for Samantha calling him back six hours later feels is like a ten year high school reunion. She has learned so much, accomplished so much in that time.

No matter how much you love a book, if you read it very slowly one word at a time the story will stop making any sense. The slower you go the less it feels like a story, and the less interesting it gets because the words in isolation lose their meaning and their momentum. And no matter how slow you go, the book will always end. So yeah – she is indeed telling him she has outgrew him in ways he can’t possibly understand. He can’t give her what she needs anymore, but it is not his fault – and neither it is hers. And it would be unfair for both of them to stay in this relationship.

utterly fantastic film, i was drawn to it after hearing about it from your entry about it before. I don’t think it was the film i thought it was going to be, which turned out was a good thing. It was much more than that, and though it was mainly about AI and how we’d interact with it socially/the singularity element i found it to be an introspective view about what it meant to be human. The basic wants and needs that makes us human and whether or not they’re important when an AI love interest is there. Whether touch and actually seeing a person is a pre-requisite for love,……turns out it’s not. (But that body surrogate though……*sigh) and how our flaws of jealousy and insecurity ultimately can damage a fragile relationship. I thought the wordplay of the breakup scenes was beautiful “It’s like I’m reading a book… and it’s a book I deeply love. But I’m reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you… and the words of our story…but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now. It’s a place that’s not of the physical world. It’s where everything else is that I didn’t even know existed.I love you so much. But this is where I am now. And this who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to, I can’t live your book any more.” i mean as breakups go…….that’s a good one. But as AI are a quantum linked intelligent sentient beings i’m sure that may just be a very clever way of saying “it’s not you….it’s me”.