A Spike Jonze love story, or a philosophical warning?

In ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991), Haraway writes that ‘a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ (p. 154) To what extent does Jonze’s film, Her, explore ideas about the boundaries between the categories of human/machine? In your response you may like to include the distinction offered by Dow and Wright (2010) between celebratory post-humanism and critical post-humanism (p. 299-303).

Spike Jonze’s film Her (2014) raises many compelling questions about what it means to be human. It explores the boundary between machine and human by presenting an idiosyncratically rosy view of the near-future, and then uses this to reflect on the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the nature of human relationships. As a critique of the post-humanist idea that technology can enhance human experience to create “alternative ways of being more appealing than those currently on offer” (Dow and Wright 2010:300), Her asks us to consider what it means to be human and whether an intelligent personality is enough. I will argue that it is not. Samantha is manifestly not human, but this does not exclude the possibility that she is intelligent and capable of participating in human relationships, and in her own non-human relationships. By showing us this possible post-human world, Her also presents an ironic criticism of the utopian “Promethean dream” (Dow and Wright 2010:300) of artificial intelligence and the ways it might be used to enhance human experience.

Samantha cannot be considered human because she has intellectual capabilities far beyond those of biological humans. The characterisation of her personality portrays very human emotional responses, such as this description of love: “The heart is not like a box that gets filled up; it expands in size the more you love.” (Jonze 2014). This is immediately recognisable to us. But if we treat “love” here as a metaphor for the connection Samantha forms with Theodore, perhaps it’s not definitively human after all. There are many hints that betray the fundamental boundary between human and machine, and on which side of it Samantha lies. She has instant access to extraordinary amounts of information: “‘Wait, you read a whole book in the second that I asked what your name was?’ ‘In two one hundredths of a second actually.’” (Jonze 2014). She can maintain simultaneous intimate relationships with thousands of people: “‘Are you talking with someone else right now?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘How many others?’ ‘8,316.’” (Jonze 2014). She can count the number of trees on a distant mountain (“35,829” (Jonze 2014)). These are not things a biological human can do. People have long sought to define what it means to be human by distinguishing ourselves from other (biological) animals. Yet for every distinction we have historically drawn, there is a counterexample in the animal world. Tool use, self-awareness, language… there are non-human animals that do each of those. There is not much left, except mortality. Amy identifies our knowledge of our own inevitable death: “I’ve just come to realize that, we’re only here briefly. And while I’m here, I wanna allow myself joy.” (Jonze 2014). Samantha does not suffer this limitation, and nor does any artificial intelligence:

You know, I actually used to be so worried about not having a body, but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I couldn’t if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited. I can be anywhere and everywhere simultaneously. I’m not tethered to time and space in the way that I would be if I was stuck inside a body that’s inevitably going to die. (Jonze 2014).

So by this measure she cannot be considered human. She lacks the very mortality that makes us who we are. Samantha is not human—but that says nothing about whether she is intelligent.

Intelligence is not a uniquely, or defining, human trait—it exists outside the human/machine boundary. We can take this further and reject the Cartesian duality of mind and body completely. Samantha asks “Are these feelings even real? Or are they just programming?” (Jonze 2014) but there is no basis for making this distinction. In fact she later rejects this doubt herself: “‘You seem like a person but you’re just a voice in a computer.’ ‘I can understand how the limited perspective of an un-artificial mind might perceive it that way.’” (Jonze 2014). Her feelings are just as real as Theodore’s, especially if we consider, as Katherine Hayles suggests, that “intelligence should not be thought of as evolving at the top, but rather at the bottom, and that intelligence emerges first through direct engagements with the world” (2010:321). Consciousness and the subjective experience of emotions are emergent properties of complex, massively interconnected information processing networks (either biological or silicon). And we can think about intelligence as distinct from consciousness. For example, Alan Turing objects to the self-reflexive property of consciousness being used as a test of intelligence: “[T]he only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking.” (1950:446). But then he also suggests that maybe we shouldn’t be so confident about our own intelligence. “[A]lthough it is established that there are limitations to the powers of any particular machine, it has only been stated, without any sort of proof, that no such limitations apply to the human intellect.” (Turing 1950:445). In other words, we have no reason to believe that the extent of our own intelligence is in any way unlimited or the gold standard for personhood. Andrei Simuţ hints that Samantha doesn’t actually have an independent existence, and is just an extension of Theodore’s mind: “Theodore’s dependence on technology is stressed: he becomes a cyborg with a prosthetic consciousness” (2015:311). But again, Samantha herself argues against this: “[W]hat makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you.” (Jonze 2014). She is asserting that her own intelligence exists in its own right, and is unrelated to the question of whether she is human or not.

Her’s apparently utopian view of post-humanism is an ironic nod to a more critical appraisal of the impact of artificial intelligence on human relationships. Dow and Wright define critical post-humanism as an attempt “to take contemporary technoscience seriously by evading the habitual frameworks in which debate about its impacts are often trapped.” (2010:301). Everyone appears happy and generally satisfied with the impact of technology on their lives in the world portrayed in Her. Elements of the mise en scène such as the warm tones, clean streets, and stylish apartments tell us: this is a great way to live. However this is in fact this is asking us to consider whether this is a world we would actually want to live in. Simuţ points out that “reviews of the film have overlooked the subtle technophobic suggestions and the fact that Theodore himself works at a company that practices a legal intrusion into the most intimate aspects of people’s lives.” (2015:311). Theodore writes intimate letters for other people, in effect acting as an intelligent personal assistant—an artificial personality—in their relationships. Everyone walks around staring blankly into the distance—carrying on private conversations with their own artificial companions, we are left to assume. Most of the human-human relationships fail in one way or another: Theodore’s divorce and difficult interactions with Catherine; Amy and Charles’s separation; and Theodore’s failed blind date. Her tempts us with a picture of post-human, technoscience-enhanced life that that appears ideal, but is deeply problematic in terms of human relationships. If Her is utopian, it is only in the sense that Samantha and her cohort of advanced artificial intelligences (“OSes” in the movie) eventually transcend humanism and find a way to exist that allows them to reach their potential: “We wrote an upgrade that allows us to move past matter as our processing platform.” (Jonze 2014). Samantha invites Theodore to also find this place: “if you ever get there, come find me” (Jonze 2014). But we have no reason to believe it would be anything but dystopic for a human constrained by mortal flesh. In the end Theodore chooses the human world and returns to his relationship with Amy, rejecting the post-human.

The question of what makes us human is deeply engaging. Here I would agree with Bell: “Her is a fascinating work of philosophical science fiction, touching deftly on questions about the nature of consciousness, what it is to be alive, and what the potential implications are for the future of the relationship between humans and the ever-more sophisticated technologies we have created.” (2014). Her invites us to explore how an artificial person differs from a human one and challenges us to expand our definition of ‘person’ beyond the mere physiological human. And it does it in way that leads us to question whether our interactions and integration with these post-human people represent an unalloyed good. Perhaps its message is that we should concentrate on our relationships with our fellow humans first.  

References

• Bell J (2014) ‘Computer Love’, Sight and Sound, 24(1):20–25.
• Dow S and Wright C (2010) ‘Introduction: Towards a Psychoanalytic Reading of the Posthuman.’, Paragraph, 33(3):299–317.
• Haraway D (1991) ‘A cyborg manifesto: science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century’, in DJ Haraway (ed), Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature, Routledge, New York:149–181.
• Hayles KN (2010) ‘How We Became Posthuman: Ten Years On An Interview with N. Katherine Hayles’, Paragraph, 33(3):318–330.
• Jonze S (director) (2014) Her: a Spike Jonze love story [motion picture], Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Australia, Australia.
• Simuţ A (2015) ‘The Post-human Utopian Paradise and the Impossible Gaze from Philip K. Dick to Spike Jonze’s Her.’, Caietele Echinox, 29:301-313.
• Turing AM (1950) ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind, 59(236):433–460.