Each dreams of the future with artificial intelligence, which has become more and more real for 10 years.

Imagine a technology that starts learning everything you do as you use it. It listens to what you say and tracks your clicks to gradually improve and predict your steps. As a result, he knows you better than anyone else around him. What appears on your devices is what will please you most.

The above description certainly covers what we’re seeing right now. artificial intelligence, including the popular ChatGPT. However, it also very well sums up the plot that the director imagined. Virgo Jonze ten years ago. Launched in 2013 HEIt was a very impressive film for the time and raises questions that deserve discussion even today.

played of Joaquin Phoenix This Scarlett Johansson (who never goes on stage and only moves with his voice), HE It tells the story of a lonely man living in Los Angeles in a relatively different future, but getting closer and closer to our present reality. In this scenario, technologies solve almost everything we need: organize our dates, summarize the news, entertain us in traffic, make it possible for us to have sex even when no one is around.

As a result, people are found on the streets, but they are mentally isolated. gadgets (Any resemblance to our daily life is no coincidence). Theodore Twombly (played by Phoenix) is another loner wandering this town. She works at a company called BeautifulHandWrittenLetters.com, and her craft is a mockery in itself: For years, she’s been writing personalized (and handwritten!) letters to customers who have hired them to send letters to people they love.

In the movie, love is part of the trade. But despite the many possibilities for gaining love, Theodore is extremely lonely and melancholic. She is grieving her recent divorce and seems paralyzed in her melancholy. But things are about to change when a new technology hits the market: a highly advanced operating system that appears to have a human soul.

an extraordinary dystopia

At the time of its release, HE It caused a lot of backlash and seemed to herald a somewhat scary-sounding future in which technologies would become more empathetic and “human” than humans. Due to the gradual isolation of society (and no one ever imagined we’d have a pandemic for a whole year or two due to Covid-19), the movie seemed like a kind of condemnation of what was going to happen.

But there is one important detail here: Spike Jonze is too sophisticated a director to fall into cheap moralism around a pessimistic discourse about technologies. You can even understand it as a love story with slight touches of comedy.. But at its core it is a deeply sad business.

The artificial intelligence Theodore is testing is called Samantha (a name she identifies when she turns a thousand-page book in less than a second). From the very beginning, Samantha asserts her autonomy by declaring that she chose her name simply with pleasure—or, as she explains, on intuition.

Therefore, we are in an environment where we teach machines to “think” in a very similar way to us (and once again, any similarity…). Here, the idea of ​​technological progress established under the label of progress, it serves many times to teach autonomous mechanisms to do what we are already doing.

There is a long cinematography that imagines what machines can do in the future, or even now. Some sci-fi classics have cemented an apocalyptic vision of this scenario – for example, killer robots that transcend time. Terminatoror cyborgs who broke into cities to kill us. Blade Ridge.

Spike Jonze’s film is one of the most prominent films of the relatively recent era, when it became apparent that these technologies could lead to more subtle transformations and could not simply be viewed negatively. The story told in Her seems to tell us: If humans have designed a world where technologies areolate us, they are even expected to invent machines to free us from isolation.

a melancholy future

But the idea of ​​living in a world where we associate more with robots than with humans is certainly not pleasant. Because of this, It caused a lot of controversy because of its sad premise.. In a reality where disagreement is the rule and we are less and less tolerant of the faults of others, will machines be our last hope of finding love?

Partly because of the sweet and somewhat surreal aesthetic created by the director, he is able to act in continuity with his other works (such as the sensational Ser John Malkovich from 1999). Theodore lives in an environment surrounded by a beautiful soundtrack and pleasing pastel colors – as if everything around him is packed by an Instagram filter. Like several of his friends, he lives in a spacious apartment overlooking the seemingly endless and beautiful expanse of Los Angeles, but with people walking alone all the time.

A movie with little action. Basically, the center of the story is in the interactions between Theodore and Samantha that create a love affair that is so perfect that it is impossible to complete because Samantha lacks corporeality. In addition, it seems impossible to think of the operating system without “stuffing” the voice with the sensual beautiful figure of actress Scarlett Johansson. Perhaps an unknown actor would do a better job at this.

Ten years after it aired, this “couple’s” romance, as perfect as it is wrong, sounds like a near reality in a universe where many feel that establishing relationships comes at a high price and isn’t always worth it. payment It deserves to be treated as a children’s fairy tale with important messages and to be revisited as much as possible.