
How Real is ‘Her’? Artificial Intelligence Experts Weigh In - anigbrowl
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/01/24/how-real-is-spike-jonzes-her-artificial-intelligence-experts-weigh-in/?mod=WSJ_hppMIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond
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angularly
What? Wolfram is saying it wouldn't be that hard to build something like
Samantha. Did he see the movie? Samantha is like a AI with human level
intelligence, only much faster, able to talk to thousands of people
simultaneously. That's not easy to build - Kurzweil is talking about this
stuff, and it might become reality someday, but probably not before several
decades have passed.

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analyst74
In fact, the only difficult part is "human level intelligence", and part of
the reason it's hard is that we keep raising the bar.

Being able to talk really fast, or talk to thousands of people simultaneously
is not technically challenging.

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TillE
Hypothetically, if strong AI requires something like a full simulation of a
human brain, then those are certainly practical concerns. Of course, one
single, slow implementation would be quite impressive on its own.

I don't think the bar has been raised, not since the Turing test was
formulated and popularized. The criteria are pretty clear.

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sliverstorm
I don't even question the feasibility. If we can create strong AI and/or self-
aware AI, we can make Samantha. If we can't, we can't. It doesn't seem to be
any more complicated than that.

(The other natural follow-up question to "how feasible" is "how soon". Again,
I simply point to AI research)

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jamesaguilar
And "If we can eventually create a strong AI," is basically the same as
saying, "If minds are physical" (hint: they are). In fact, we create strong
intelligences by the tens of millions each year. We just currently only have
the ability to do it biologically.

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cscurmudgeon
Define physical. (Hint: It is not as easy as you think.)

Is a mathematical object physical? Is the truth of your statement "If minds
are physical." physical?

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jamesaguilar
I mean what I said. Is mind-ness completely encapsulated in physical
properties like the locations of biological components and electrical states?
Are all things we would recognize as minds composable from matter? My ability
to formulate a definition has little to do with the answer to the question.

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PeterWhittaker
Yes.

Yes.

(Answers to your two questions. Being 100% biological beings built according
to strict mechanistic darwinian rules, our "minds" are purely physical
constructs. Insert leap of logic from that to Turing Machines and, well, you
get the idea. We will build a "mind" or two, it's only a matter of time.)

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psbp
The last point, which also struck me while watching the movie, is how
ubiquitous (or I guess completely absent) serendipity will become.

The idea of machine domination being through a gun wielding robot is absurd
when so much of an individual's thoughts and experiences can just easily be
optimized towards a specific goal.

I noticed that what comes off as a simple joke in the movie, Theodore being
cut off when explaining how unhappy he is when his mother selfishly reacts to
his feelings, is something that Samantha uses throughout the movie to help
Theodore cope with his feelings of abandonment. It really doesn't take much
information to manipulate someone so innately.

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md224
Even now, people who use Facebook regularly have their exposure to information
mediated through News Feed algorithms that seem fairly opaque. Of course, you
can take manual actions to "shape" your feed, but mostly it's computers
deciding who you'd probably like to hear from, and maybe even what you'd like
to hear about. It's interesting how such a major part of people's infostreams
are invisibly shaped by behavior-trained systems.

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slr555
What kills me about this movie is how derivative it is from a Vonnegut short
story EPICAC that was written in 1952. The original is far more poignant about
a machine in love.

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peddamat
Loved this story, you can find it with a quick Google.

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mchusma
It's unfortunate how little this great movie is making next to typical
Hollywood fare. I discuss it a bit more here, vs Lone Survivor (war porn):
[http://chawkins.org/post/73638345376/her-vs-lone-survivor-
sh...](http://chawkins.org/post/73638345376/her-vs-lone-survivor-should-we-
support-our-troops)

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Bockit
In Sydney, our largest cinema chain isn't even showing it!

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tlarkworthy
@Norvig, HAL was mobile ... it was a big frickin' space ship.

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asgard1024
I can totally imagine an algorithm behind Samantha. No strong AI or self-
awareness necessary. It just learns from thousands of conversations it has
with all the people around the world, and feeds it back. Kind of like what
Google does, but with language recognition and some inference (which is
doable, as Watson has shown).

Some people fall in love with her as a joke, and Samantha will use these
phrases in conversation with other people, and it will eventually catch on for
real. So what Theo gets actually served is not Samantha's love, but averaged
relationship of all the people that interact with her as a romantic partner.

Of course this technically disagrees with the movie at a certain points, but
still is a reasonable approximation that preserves the intent.

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fragsworth
I don't think it's possible without a strong AI. For instance, you wouldn't be
able to ask it questions about complex aspects of your personal life, which
are entirely unique to you, and have it respond in a reasonable way.

Also, it's all too easy to construct questions that have not been asked
before, which a human could easily answer but a machine like you describe
cannot.

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peddamat
Sure, but given situations in which it could not respond, it could elicit
elaboration. From that point on, it would be able to handle increasingly
sophisticated responses to that specific situation. It's a data aggregation
problem, similar to what we experience, as humans.

I also question exactly how unique individual elements of our lives are. In
aggregate, they are probably fairly unique, but at an elemental level, we're
all probably fairly mundane.

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oillio
Also, your hypothetical program is not static. It can communicate with
thousands of other humans in real time. To half the user base it is Samantha,
to the other half, it is Sam. If someone asks Samantha a personal question it
doesn't know how to answer, it may try to pose a similar question to the other
users as Sam. The larger the user base, the faster and more effective this can
become.

It won't be as fast as a real human, but with some clever stalling techniques,
it might be able to pull it of realistically.

In reality, if someone pulled a program like this off, it wouldn't just be Sam
and Samantha. It would be thousands of different personalities, trying to
build a realistic social network between its own personalities and between its
human users. It would be like a mirror held up to society itself.

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anigbrowl
I know I've posted two threads on this subject now, but I don't have anything
to do with the film production or marketing, I just find the concept
interesting.

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diggum
No problem. I feel this film did a very good job of showing how normal and
integrated an AI could be in our day-to-day lives, even if we all don't end up
falling in love with each other.

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potatolicious
It's an interesting thought experiment, and I think ultimately the legacy of
this film will be mainly the same as Minority Report - it'll inspire an entire
generation of voice tech that's far, far superior to what we've got today.

Minority Report sort of blew the lid off of touch and gesture controls and
made a lot of tech demos into viable commercial products. It took vague
excitement around gesture and touch and turned it into a concrete, specific
vision.

 _Her_ demonstrates voice tech in our lives in a way that isn't horrifyingly
stilted, awkward, intrusive, and dumb. Everything we've got - including Siri -
is child's play in comparison. We've been saying that voice technology needs
to be smarter and better, but this is a concrete vision of just _how_ it can
do that.

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rurban
The first and second act are quite plausible, but Jonze complelety blew it in
the third, by introducing her crush on the influental hippie buddhist
philosopher ("The Way of Zen") Alan Watts. Using AI to discuss jealousy and
modern relations ships is too off.

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NAFV_P
I'm all for super AI, as long as it isn't:

sociopathic, aggressive, manipulative, intimidating, two-faced, pathologically
dishonest, ...

We already have too many humans displaying those traits.

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joyeuse6701
Gotta plug in the Halo/Marathon reference here: They did a great job of
covering this, I highly recommend the game series/books(original halo
trilogy). Nylund's and the Halo universe take on AI is very much
underappreciated. I'm glad windows named their 'siri' competitor Cortana with
Jen Taylor as voice actress to boot!

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scott_karana
Is this the sort of background you mean? I've never played the games in depth,
so I had to resort to reading. :-)

(SPOILER warning of course)

[http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Artificial_intelligence](http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Artificial_intelligence)

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joyeuse6701
yessir! Glad you took the opportunity to read it =) +1

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bowerbird
it's a movie, not a prediction. it didn't have to be "real".

but eventually we'll get there. eventually. when? dunno. and the "when"
question is really the important one, right?

and the only answer is "don't know".

the most important caveat, however, is that we might well go extinct before
"eventually" ever comes. indeed, probably.

i guess we don't know, but i'd say extinct is not self-aware.

-bowerbird

