In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., wrote a computer program called Eliza, which was designed to engage in casual conversation with anybody who sat down to type with it. Eliza worked by latching on to keywords in the user’s dialogue and then, in a kind of automated Mad Libs, slotted them into open-ended responses, in the manner of a so-called non-directive therapist. (Weizenbaum wrote that Eliza’s script, which he called Doctor, was a parody of the method of the psychologist Carl Rogers.) “I’m depressed,” a user might type. “I’m sorry to hear you are depressed,” Eliza would respond.
Eliza was a milestone in computer understanding of natural language. 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. “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. “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. 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.”
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, makes a comfortable living in 2025-ish Los Angeles, where he works for a company called Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com. 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. Love, in the slight future, is a mediated and highly indirect affair.
Twombly himself is estranged from his wife. 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. Into this world, as pleasant and bleak as a catalogue, comes a technological innovation advertised as “OS One.” No sooner has Twombly thumbed its beautiful letterpress booklet and submitted to a curious configuration interview—“What is your relationship with your mother like?”—than the voice of Scarlett Johansson emerges, rich as radio and seeming to emanate not so much from the desktop and mobile devices on which she runs as from the room itself.
At first, Twombly’s new O.S., who has enough of a sense of identity to name herself Samantha, chides Twombly for speaking to her in the robotized fragments typical of earlier human-computer speech. (The way we speak to Siri today, for instance.) When Twombly says “Check mail,” Samantha mocks him as though he’d just said “Me Tarzan.” Though her mind is capable of effortlessly taking in all the text in the world’s digitized libraries, Twombly’s mobile device is her eyes and ears, and Twombly safety-pins “Samantha” in his breast pocket for a trip into the city, so that she can share his view.
Initially ashamed to admit that he’s “dating” an O.S., Twombly discovers that he is far from alone. In fact, people everywhere seem to be dating or befriending them. (Amy, among Twombly’s only real-life friends, finds in her O.S. a female best friend and confidante with whom to gossip and snark and heal.) Practically overnight, the prevailing social fabric is utterly rearranged, and Jonze paints this shift as astonishingly casual. In one scene, we see people traipsing up a set of public-transit stairs, each yammering away, presumably to an O.S.—though there is no way for us to know whether or not there is a “real” person on the other end, and that seems to be part of Jonze’s point.
Soon Samantha becomes less machine-like than Twombly. Twombly spends his free time playing video games and wearing a hollow expression; Samantha composes music. Twombly kills time during his morning commute by consuming celebrity gossip; Samantha devours the writings of Alan Watts. (One is reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “EPICAC,” from 1950, in which the narrator says of the computer mainframe of the title, “You can call him a machine if you want to. He looked like a machine, but he was a whole lot less like a machine than some people I could name.”)
Twombly and Samantha’s rapport and companionship rivals, maybe exceeds, most screen romances to which viewers are intended to aspire. And yet, ultimately, you can’t entirely shake the feeling that Twombly is still a man alone, alienated, detached from society, talking to himself. The spectre and peril of this kind of solipsism are hardly new—Descartes, in his “Meditations,” famously doubts the reality of his own body—but increasingly they possess the popular cultural imagination. Both “The Matrix” and “The Truman Show” grapple, in different ways, with the idea of a reality that exists only in our minds, or that is real only for us, and us alone. In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “50 First Dates,” the idea of intimacy is explored more as a fragile neurological event than as a feeling.
To those who would argue that a computer’s demonstration of humanlike behavior is hardly enough to make it legitimately “conscious,” Turing responds that the same can be said of human behavior: “According to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man,” he wrote. The solipsist’s doubts about the world outside himself are so powerful that he doubts the interior worlds of other people just as strongly as he doubts the interior worlds of machines. Belief in the minds of others is just as much of a leap as love is. Following Turing’s logic, Twombly is not a solipsist for getting emotionally involved with his O.S.; he’d be a solipsist not to.
So where does that leave us? “Her,” not unlike the Turing Test itself, says more about the nature of human intimacy than it does about the limits of computation. As both an author and a lover of literature, I would be a hypocrite to condemn too strongly the power of indirect or one-way intimacy. I run the disembodied thoughts of some other mind through my own, like code, and feel close to someone else, living or dead, while risking nothing, offering nothing. And yet the communion, I would argue, is real. Books themselves are perhaps the first chatbots: long-winded and poor listeners, they nonetheless have the power to make the reader feel known, understood, challenged, spurred to greatness, not alone. On the other hand, we might notice that writing, the medium of literature and the Turing Test, leaves out much of what makes language tick: timing, prosody, emphasis, tone. Language is more than libretto; we shouldn’t settle for the sheet music when we can have the performance.
Even spoken language, however, replete with dynamics of tone, timing, gesture, and expression, needs a physical and mental world to respond to. At the beginning of the film, Samantha, like any replicated piece of hardware or software, and, as it happens, like any human newborn, has tendencies and capacities but no stories. She gains them by doing things—and so does Twombly. With Samantha, he performs a single axel in a shopping center, people-watches at the beach, picnics with friends on a bluff. In teaching her the world, he learns it. “I love the way you look at the world,” he says to her. Her safety-pinned vantage, of course, is his own.
The final lesson of Whitman’s “learn’d astronomer” was to leave the classroom. (“Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”) Eliza’s is to leave the chat room. “I want to learn everything about everything,” Samantha says, and Twombly, with this mandate, has reason to leave the house. Whether Samantha has come alive by the end of the film is a worthy question; whether Twombly has is a more important one. What Twombly ultimately needed wasn’t company; it was a wake-up call. He gets one. So do we.
