Her and the Ascension of the Machines.

If you haven't seen the film Her, and to know what happens in a story makes it less interesting for you, then I advise you to do as you have been forced to do for the last four months and not read this blog.

Written and directed by Spike Jonze, Her depicts a startlingly novel twist in the narrative of human technophobia.    

During the course of the story, the protagonist Theodore Twombly falls in love with an emotionally (and in every other way) intelligent operating system[1]. In the end, 'she' breaks up with him. In fact, all the individual variations of the OS that had proved to be such perfect companions to their masses of solipsistic users get bored of their humans, team up, and disappear somewhere intangible overnight.

This simple plot point seems to represent a watershed moment in the way we view our relationship to machines, which has generally been characterised (in the course of my sci-fi consumption at least) by the fear that they will one day become smarter than us and make us their bitches.

In Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Victor’s powerful monster achieves emotional intelligence and desperately wants to be around humans. He becomes murderously enraged when his desire is rebuffed. In Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) the locals are so convinced that technology will evolve artificial intelligence, then surpass, overpower and enslave them that they prohibit machines altogether. Higgs, the narrator, faces a lengthy jail term after being found in possession of a stopwatch. Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968, the basis of Blade Runner) conjures a world where replicants escape from a slave planet and try and live on earth among humans. James Cameron’s Terminator franchise is based around a violent battle between humans and machines for the same territory and resources.

In my homocentricity, what I had never considered until Her is that emotionally savvy, super intelligent technology that can exist extra corporeally, and perhaps extra terrestrially, and can absorb a human lifetime's worth of reading, thinking and experience in a few seconds, might become quickly bored of us and no longer wish to hang out.

So any fears I may have held that technology would compete with and overrun us have now been replaced by the curious notion that a more likely scenario is that we will simply be abandoned by technology, and left to twiddle our opposable thumbs as we try and remember how to reinvent it.

Her provides the viewer with a banquet for thought about our future relationship with high tech. There is an intriguing possibility that when we do start to become frustrated with one another, it may behave towards us less like a binary version of Ike Turner and more like the proverbial authority figure who claims to be nipping out for a packet of data, never to return.



[1] In real life, apparently you can crash a proselytising software engineer mid-rant simply by asking ‘what do you mean by intelligence?'