![]() ![]() For companionship, he turns either to “Internet porn” (one of the film’s rare scriptural miscues, as anachronistic as saying that he listens to “digital music”) or to a kind of phone-sex app, whose anonymous participants sign on, talk dirty, climax, and perfunctorily sign out. Twombly himself is estranged from his wife. Love, in the slight future, is a mediated and highly indirect affair. His job is to empathize so strongly with people he has never met that he can put their love into words better than they can themselves. ![]() Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, makes a comfortable living in 2025-ish Los Angeles, where he works for a company called. ![]() In “Her,” the new film by Spike Jonze, we’re taken, as Jonze has described it, to the “slight future”-a world just at the change point when artificial intelligence has become capable of interacting with humans more or less seamlessly. Since 2011, Apple’s Siri has hummed quietly inside hundreds of millions of phones and tablets, equipped to listen, speak, and act based on a user’s request. But ever more sophisticated programs in the Eliza mold-now widely known as “chatbots”-proliferate, mimicking human dialogue in chat rooms, corporate customer-service interfaces, and through e-mail, for purposes ranging from commerce to amusement to fraud. A program that can converse so fluently that people can’t tell it’s a program is said to pass the Turing Test, a nod to Alan Turing, the British code-breaker and computing visionary who, in 1950, predicted that by the twenty-first century we would reach a point at which we would “speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” The consensus, to this point, is that the Turing Test has yet to be passed. The idea that people might be unable to distinguish a conversation with a person from a conversation with a machine is rooted in the earliest days of artificial-intelligence research. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.” He continued, “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” “Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. “I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it,” he wrote. Yet Weizenbaum was more concerned with how users seemed to form an emotional relationship with the program, which consisted of nothing more than a few hundred lines of code. Eliza was a milestone in computer understanding of natural language. ![]()
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