Spike Jonze

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“A Prominent Futurologist Has Claimed That AI Girlfriends (And Presumably Boyfriends)…Could Become A Reality By 2029”

February 20, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Computer dating, with the help of IBM’s ENIAC, stretches back at least to the 1960s (listen here to a 50-year-old radio report about it). But when futurist Ray Kurzweil talks about computer dating, he doesn’t think of the machine as a middleman but as a ladies’ man (or lady or some other variation on the theme). It’s disquieting to a lot of us, but is it just around the bend? The opening of Ben Child’s Guardian article about Kurzweil’s recent review of Spike Jonze’s Her:

“It might just be music to the ears of lovelorn geeks prepared to wait another 15 years to meet the love of their lives: a prominent futurologist has claimed that AI girlfriends (and presumably boyfriends) like the one played by Scarlett Johansson in the Oscar-nominated film Her could become a reality by 2029.

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and Google’s director of engineering makes the claim in a review of Spike Jonze’s much-praised sci-fi romance. In a post on his website, Kurzweil delivered a generally positive verdict on the film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man called Theodore who falls in love with his operating system, Samantha, before moving on to its technological implications.”

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“Is It Necessary To Make Intelligent Systems Human-Like?”

February 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s clear by now that our natural tendency is to accept machines that can feign humanness, even when there’s no logical reason to do so. That makes it easier for us to transition to a digital world but often confuses the question of what is genuine AI, what is simulacra and what is somewhere in between. In a Wired piece, Vlad Sejnoha uses Spike Jonze’s Her to take a look at the future of computerized assistants. An excerpt:

“One of the most compelling aspects of Samantha is that she behaves in an utterly human-like manner, with a true sense of what is humorous and sad. This is yet a higher level of reasoning, and huge challenges remain to truly understand — and program — social relationships, emotional ties, and humor, which are all parts of everyday knowledge. It is more conceivable that we will be able to make a system understand why a person feels sad or happy (in the most primitive terms, perhaps because of realization of goal failure or goal success), than actually simulating or replicating visceral feelings in machines.

Is it necessary to make intelligent systems human-like?

Much of human behavior is motivated by emotions and not by black-and-white logical arguments (search through any popular online news blog for evidence!). The machine thus needs to understand to some degree why a human is doing something or wants something done, just as much as we demand an explanation from them about their own behavior. There is also a very practical reason to want this: in order to interact effectively we need a model of the ‘other,’ whether it’s an app or a person. At a high level of sophistication it will be faster and more efficient to allow us to start from such models we have of humans, as opposed to slowly discovering the parameters of a wholly alien and new ‘AI tool.’

There is also that astonishing voice… Samantha had us at that first playful and breathy ‘Hi.’

The amazing emotional range and subtle modulation of Samantha’s voice is beyond what today’s speech synthesis can produce, but this technology is on a trajectory to cross the ‘uncanny valley’ (the awkward zone of ‘close but not quite human’ performance) in the next few years. New speech generation models, driven in part by machine learning as well as by explicit knowledge of the meaning of the text, will be able to produce artificial voices with impressively natural characteristics and absence of artifacts.”

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“A Software Program (An AI) Can — Will — Be Believably Human And Lovable”

February 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Ray Kurzweil’s compelling review of the Oscar-nominated Her, a near-future film he sees as nearer than most do:

“Her, written, directed and produced by Spike Jonze, presents a nuanced love story between a man and his operating system.

Although there are caveats I could (and will) mention about the details of the OS and how the lovers interact, the movie compellingly presents the core idea that a software program (an AI) can — will — be believably human and lovable.

This is a breakthrough concept in cinematic futurism in the way that The Matrix presented a realistic vision that virtual reality will ultimately be as real as, well, real reality.

Jonze started his feature-motion-picture career directing Being John Malkovich, which also presents a realistic vision of a future technology — one that is now close at hand: being able to experience reality through the eyes and ears of someone else.

With emerging eye-mounted displays that project images onto the wearer’s retinas and also look out at the world, we will indeed soon be able to do exactly that. When we send nanobots into the brain — a circa-2030s scenario by my timeline — we will be able to do this with all of the senses, and even intercept other people’s emotional responses.”

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“Extremely Short Exposures To A Relatively Simple Computer Program Could Induce Powerful Delusional Thinking In Quite Normal People”

January 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The real shift in our time isn’t only that we’ve stopped worrying about surveillance, exhibitionism and a lack of privacy, but that we’ve embraced these things–demanded them, even. There must have been something lacking in our lives, something gone unfulfilled. But is this intimacy with technology and the sense of connection and friendship and relationship that attends it–often merely a likeness of love–an evolutionary correction or merely a desperate swipe in the wrong direction?

The opening of Brian Christian’s New Yorker piece about Spike Jonze’s Her, a film about love in the time of simulacra, in which a near-future man is wowed by a “woman” who seems to him like more than just another pretty interface:

“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.”

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