What Spike Jonze's Her Got Very Wrong About Artificial Intelligence

I did not particularly care for Spike Jonze's film Her.

There were many reasons for this. MANY reasons. But the one I want to discuss right now is how little sense Theodore Twombly's whole employment situation made. He writes personal letters for other people--and seems to make a very good living from it.

It seemed to me to be only too obvious that such work was likely to be ill-paid given any plausible economics of such an industry (just how many writers was one supposed to produce in a day, at what cost?)--even before one considered the extreme ease with which it could be offshored (for instance, to India, with its large population of well-educated English speakers and far lower labor and other costs), an option that Twombly's employers could not be expected to overlook.

Indeed, it seemed that the work would have been taken out of the hands of even the worst-paid humans by a level of artificial intelligence far lower than what Twombly's operating system displays at even the beginning of the film, given the scene where "Samantha" at a stroke improves the letters Theodore is working on. Editing and rewriting Twombly's work quickly, efficiently, successfully is something one cannot do unless they already know how to write at least as well as Twombly--and, as Theodore's getting this capacity as part of an ordinary consumer purchase shows, his employers could probably have replaced him with an app doing the job much more efficiently and cheaply than he could quite some time before, and would probably have rushed to do so even had they for some inexplicable reason declined to offshore his job.

I find myself thinking about all this again because our recent experience of artificial intelligence is bearing out those expectations. Today the mere creator of a first draft is decreasingly in demand--those who did such work reduced to making corrections on drafts generated by a chatbot, precisely because this is the higher-level skill that has thus far eluded the AI we have for the time being (contrary to what Twombly benefited from in his work, and what most writers today would really want, instead of the ticket to the unemployment line they are getting).

Of course, Her was not really about the likely path of such technology's development (at least, prior to the Singularitarian note on which the story ends), nor the economic and labor implications of that development. The concerns of those who make "independent-ish" films such as this, and of the critics who claque so enthusiastically for movies like these, are more "personal."

The results, however, have me once more standing with Emile Zola and H.G. Wells and all the others who tried to drag literature out of the eighteenth century in saying that it is hard to do "the personal" well when not giving any thought whatsoever to the world the "person" being written about actually has to live in.