Can We Build 'Her'?: What Samantha Tells Us About the Future of AI

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2021-05-30 01:00:06

The movie Her has captured the public imagination with its vision of a lightning-fast evolutionary trajectory of virtual assistants, and the emotional bonds we could form with them. Is this a likely future?

The film’s narrative arc shows the evolution of the Samantha operating system and her relationship with her user, Theodore, transforming from a competent assistant, to a literary agent that proactively arranges the publication of Theodore’s letters, to an ideal girlfriend, and ultimately to an entity that loses interest in humans because they have become unsatisfying companions. Throughout, Samantha is an impressive conversationalist with a perfect command of language, a grasp of the broader context, a grounding in common sense, and a mastery of the emotional realm.

This is a dizzying progression, but even Samantha’s first, strictly utilitarian incarnation is impressive. Her speech recognition, natural language understanding, speech generation, dialog, reasoning, planning, and learning all far exceed the current state of the art. She is able to take on complex tasks — she filters Theodore’s inbox with a sophisticated understanding of the goal — and is able to engage in flexible reasoning without any obviously predetermined responses.