There is a moment in Spike Jonze’s 2013 sci-fi Her when lovestruck Theo finally asks his AI partner Samantha if she is involved in any other relationships. She replies sweetly that she is talking with 8,316 other people and is in love with 641 of them. The film never gets around to exploring what an AI means when it says it is “in love.” But the audience knows how Theo feels.
Until recently, machines worked passively alongside humans, predictably enacting our inventiveness. Today, companion technologies listen to people, watch over people, respond to people, and act independently of people, while operating outside and beyond the knowledge or comprehension of most. Questioning how humans want to relate to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the coming decades need not be muddled together with fantastical catastrophising about machine consciousness or human obsolescence.
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