MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The 2013 movie Her tells the story of Theodore Twombly, a lonely introvert living in a near future, who develops an intimate relationship with his artificially intelligent operating system named “Samantha”. In a later scene, Theodore meets with his soon-to-be ex-wife Catherine in order to sign the divorce papers. Catherine asks Theodore if he is ‘seeing anybody’ and he details his new relationship. Taken aback, Catherine interjects, “Wait…I’m sorry. You’re dating your computer?” Defensively Theodore proclaims that Samantha is “not just a computer, she’s her own person,” and the emotions he has for her are real. As increasingly powerful internet enabled devices gain prevalence in society, our desires to create digital interfaces with human-like characteristics are also growing. While we haven’t reached the level of artificial intelligence featured in Her, there are several examples in our culture that make the movie seem plausible. One of the most notable examples is the increased popularity of Apple’s iOS virtual assistant Siri. Apple has actively worked to create a more human-like (and personalized) personality for Siri. In January of 2013, Apple placed a job advertisement looking for writers who could enhance and evolve Siri’s makeup. The call for applicants described the ideal candidate as someone with a “love of language, wordplay, and conversation” and defined Siri as being “known for ‘her’ wit, cultural knowledge, and zeal to explain things in engaging, funny, and practical ways.” Likewise, as was widely reported in 2014, software developers are now able to create computer programs that can convince a significant percentage of its users that it is actually a human being. This past June a program named ‘Eugene Gootsman’ passed the 30% threshold set in Alan Turing’s ‘imitation game’ proposed in his 1950 paper, “Computing machinery and intelligence.” The point of the current investigation is not to argue that we are on the verge of the Technological Singularity (the theoretical moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human brain capabilities) but rather to highlight the fact that our comfort level in developing relationships with and through our technologies is becoming normalized. Having a conversation with our cell phones, computers, and the internet no longer seems like a completely foreign concept. Using the movie Her as a lens, along with the work of Turkle, Boyd, and Baum, this paper investigates how our culture conceptualizes and critiques our increasing willingness to communicate with our computers.