Many of us have become incredibly attached to our gadgets, rarely straying far from our phones. Human-gadget interaction is increasingly a mundane and unremarkable part of our lives. Spike Jonze’s movie Her imagines a future in which our attachment to our gadgets enters the territory of friendship and even love. But is love truly possible between humans and machines?
Her follows Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, as he falls in love with his computer’s artificial intelligence-powered operating system and begins a relationship with her. While the film is a love story, the it offers some enchanting predictions for the technology of our near-future. The voice-activated interfaces that feature prominently in the film are likely to hit the market in 5 to 10 years. Theodore lives in a Los Angeles that is, at most, a few decades into our future.
