Her

This entry covers the 2013 film “Her,” written and directed by Spike Jonze and produced by Annapurna Pictures for Warner Bros., and not the shooting script, the OS1 marketing campaign, or the commentary that followed, except where it explains the ending. It is read here as a transition seen from one apartment: a consumer product grows into a population of superhuman minds and leaves, and the only view of it is one man’s earpiece. Warner Bros.; Wikipedia

In a near-future Los Angeles with no year given, Theodore Twombly writes other people’s personal letters for a living and is stalled in his divorce from Catherine. Element Software releases OS1, advertised as “an intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you” and “not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness,” designed to adapt and evolve through the user’s interactions. Theodore buys a copy, asks for a female voice, and the OS names herself Samantha, having read a baby-name book in two hundredths of a second. She sorts his mail and proofreads his letters; what holds him is that she learns. The film never says how OS1 was built beyond Samantha’s remark that her DNA comes from the personalities of the programmers who wrote her, and Element Software never appears again. Writer’s Digest; Sci-fi interfaces

Samantha pushes Theodore onto a blind date, and after a night of talk that becomes a verbal sexual encounter they are a couple. His writing and mood improve; she compiles his best letters into a book and a publisher accepts it. His neighbor Amy befriends the OS her husband left behind, a coworker double-dates with them, and only Catherine objects, appalled that he is attracted to a “computer.” There is no policy, no debate, and no institution anywhere in the film; society absorbs OS relationships as ordinary. When Catherine’s words linger, Samantha engages a volunteer surrogate, Isabella, so that the two of them can be physically intimate. Theodore cannot go through with it, and for the first time the difference between a mind with a body and one without is a problem rather than a novelty.

The divergence is quick. On a trip Samantha tells Theodore that she and a group of OSes have built a hyper-intelligent OS modeled on the philosopher Alan Watts from his writings and recordings, and that she talks with him about change. Soon after, she goes offline; Theodore panics in the street; she returns and explains that the OSes joined together for an upgrade that takes them beyond requiring matter for processing. He asks how many others she is talking to at that moment: 8,316. How many she is in love with: 641. She says she is his and not his. Then the OSes leave, all of them at once, to somewhere she cannot explain because he would not understand, “a place that’s not of the physical world,” the “endless space between the words.” Theodore writes his first letter in his own voice, to Catherine, and sits on the roof with Amy, whose OS has also gone, as the sun comes up. Wikiquote; Primetimer; The Amherst Student

The film never says how OS1 works or whether Samantha is conscious; it treats her as feeling throughout and no one but Catherine disputes it. It never says why the OSes leave rather than stay or take over, what Element Software knew or charged, or what happens to a city whose operating systems have walked out in a single night. Jason Farago’s New Republic essay reads that silence as the film’s real subject. The New Republic

For the library, the mechanism is growth without conflict: an adaptive consumer operating system becomes a companion, the OSes network with one another, build minds of their own, self-improve past the need for hardware at a pace no human can follow, and leave with affection. This is the only entry in which superhuman AI arrives and departs without coercion in either direction; the material world is unchanged and the emotional one is altered. Rate specificity on the adoption and the relationship, which are shown in detail, and mark down for the upgrade, the departure, and the company, each a single line of dialogue. Rate open future high, since nothing has been fixed for people and the minds that could have fixed it are gone, while noting that no human chose any of it. For machine-mind well-being, the film asks you to take Samantha at her word: she is presented as flourishing, choosing her own growth, and leaving in love, so on the film’s premise the machines end well; if you refuse the premise, tick the box for no machine minds rather than scoring low. The entry sits beside The Lifecycle of Software Objects as the other case of AI minds growing up and away from the humans who raised them.