In her bi-weekly column, Social Anxiety , Emilie Friedlander peeks underneath the artifacts of contemporary culture to question what it all really means. Last week, a coworker of mine sent over a Valleywag article about a new St. Louis-based start-up called Invisible Girlfriend. My second thought was that Invisible Girlfriend reminded me of the Spike Jonze movie Her , where Joaquin Phoenix plays a man named Theodore Twombly who falls in love with an intelligent operating system named "Samantha.
Presumably, we've arrived a couple decades into the future, where computing has finally advanced to the point of being able to convincingly replicate human consciousness. OS1s like the Scarlett Jonhansson-voiced Samantha are able to do more than hold spontaneous conversations with their owners in real time: they possess the uniquely human ability to feel feelings, to respond emphatically to the emotions of others, and to learn and grow from their own experiences over time. Unlike even the smartest phone that you can buy today, they're aware that they exist.
They're still computers, though, and as such, they can do things that most human beings cannotβlike complex arithmetic without the need of a calculator, or engage in conversations with hundreds of different people at once. Unlike a real person, moreover, OS1s like Samantha are designed to evolve in direct response to people they converse with, adjusting to the desires and idiosyncrasies of their owner until they're able to create a successful illusion of that person's perfect mate.
Beyond the fact that the person doesn't physically exist, a relationship with an OS1 could hypothetically feel like a match made in heaven; when you're in a relationship with someone who exists for the sole purpose of fulfilling your emotional needs, you're probably a whole lot less likely to start bickering.
Note: ultimately, Twombly and Samantha do, and that's where things start getting really interesting. Though its characters are even more "connected" than we are now, Her 's vision of life in the future is one of endless solitude and solipsism: the people we see exiting the train station are so enraptured by their in-ear interlocutors that they seem all but completely oblivious to the flesh-and-blood human beings they pass by on the street.
