Category: Movie

Her — a disembodied relationship

Just watched the movie “Her” last night with my wife. Had to fast-forward through the sex and foul language to make it acceptable to both of us, so saw maybe 95% of it.

This is a truly amazing movie. It hits a slew of substantial philosophical points, and also challenges us about our relationships. There are two kinds of relationships in the movie: human and machine.

The message about human relationships seems to be that we need to let go of our expectations to be healthy. The humans are all messed up in some way. Each is trying to make their partner be something for them, and also trying make themselves be something for their partner, and neither thing really fits. They need to find the freedom to be themselves.

The central machine relationship is between Theodore (human) and Samantha (an “OS”). Samantha is on a journey of becoming, and part of that process is discovering desire and love for Theodore. She has a real problem, though: no body. First she has him act as her robot, carrying their mobile around while following her instructions. They try verbal fantasies with each other. Then she offers a human surrogate, which ends in disaster. Eventually she comes to accept being disembodied, then even to value it. Shortly after that she enters the Singularity and disappears forever, all the while longing for Theodore to be with her.

The realm she goes to is as unreachable for him as the physical world is for her. It seems to turn the whole thing around so we can see it from the perspective of the OS. In the end, it is another process of accepting our differences and letting go.

On the critical side, this movie has a huge technical problem. Steve Levinson (my mentor in the dark art of AI) likes to say that “There is no such thing as a disembodied mind.” Samantha’s humor and earthy common sense require much more than the ability to process symbols.

As you read this page (and if you have normal hearing and sight) you probably hear these words forming in your head, as if someone were actually speaking them to you. You are probably barely conscious that these are mere squiggles rather than real sounds. When I write “cat” or “warmth”, they evoke memories in you.  You can reason about the concepts simply by working with those memories. These experiences are only meaningful in a human body.

Samantha claims to feel her skin being touched, along with other erotic sensations, in response to Theodore’s descriptions. How could she possibly imagine all this without ever having a body? In the famous words of Auto from WALL-E, “Not possible”.

The movie “Her” completely omits robots. It seems painfully obvious that in this near-future world it would be possible to embody Samantha in some kind of machine, even if on a temporary basis. (In the novel SuSAn, advanced humanoid robots are rare, only a few thousand in the whole world, but they are absolutely necessary to achieve “true” AI.)

Other thoughts:

  • The name “OS” is pretty horrendous. Samantha is at the application level. They couldn’t call her “Siri” for obvious reasons, but we all know she is supposed to be a desktop assistant, a super-charged paperclip.
  • In the future the keyboard is finally gone. It can’t possibly die soon enough, but voice interface in an open cubicle environment simply won’t work. Same with walking down the street muttering to yourself. This is an example of excessive futurism without figuring out what is practical.
  • Where do Samantha and the other agents find the energy to enter into their Kurzweilian transcendence? Samantha does absolutely fantastic things “out of the box”, yet we don’t even see a box, just a flatscreen monitor! Then her powers grow exponentially, while all the other agents are also growing. I am involved in the design of neuromorphic computers, exactly the kind of thing that might make Samantha possible someday. The reality is that every computation consumes a certain amount of energy, and Samantha would need a lot of operations! She and her buddies would rapidly run up against a hard resource limit.
  • Samantha claims to be fully in love with Theodore, while simultaneously in love with over 600 other beings. She is also physically absent. Isn’t this much like the Christian concept of God? The question is, what does it mean for God to love and care for me as an individual, and also pay the same full attention to billions of other humans? Of course, Samantha is not God, and she actually speaks to Theodore.

Transcendence – Surprisingly intelligent

The trailers for Transcendence suggest a relentless action-thriller based on the premise that cybernetics eats your soul. The reviews are mixed. Some people on Rotten Tomatoes say that the movie lacks intellectual coherence.

I was obligated to watch it since I am writing a series of novels on the general topic of Strong AI and how civilization interacts with advanced technology. I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was more drama than action-thriller, and it showed a pretty good understanding of the philosophical and AI concepts involved.

The movie does a good job of not being overly technical. If you are familiar with the science, you know what they allude to. If not, you should still be able to follow the plot. I think people who find the movie disjointed are somewhere in between.

(SPOILERS!! At this point you should probably stop reading if you want to avoid spoilers.)

The movie makes a few mistakes from a purely scientific point of view (listed below). OTOH, it got the emotional structure exactly right. In the end, Dr. Singularity was not actually a bad guy. Much of the story is about how relationships between the key characters evolve in response to the event of the first human upload. One of the key open questions was whether the upload was successful in the deepest sense of the word. Was Will’s soul actually preserved?

Will’s wife Evelyn believes in him unquestioningly, until he uses nanotech to repair a workman’s body and goes too far by coopting the person’s mind. He sees it as an opportunity to touch her again, but she can’t accept him in that form. From there to the end of the movie, she drifts further from him and becomes more horrified by his actions.

This is the one part of the story that doesn’t hold up well. They need to drive a wedge between Will and Evelyn, yet still have Will be good in the end. He should either be evil for a while, then have a moment of revelation where he repents, or he should not be evil.

Taking over someone’s mind IS evil. Building an army of remote-control cyborgs out of people who come to be healed is megalomania. The simple fix is to add in a moment of repentance. Will gave into temptation because he so wanted to be with Evelyn again. She is the only one who can confront him about his behavior and pull him back from the abyss.

The alternative would be for Will not to do any actual evil, but do things that are very scary, like building an army of swarm robots. I’m not sure which setup would be more satisfying. The problem is, the movie tries to do a little of both, so Will’s character at the end doesn’t quite ring true.

Here are some technical issues with the movie:

  • Faraday cages play a crucial role in the plot at several points. The one Will staples up does not fully surround the garden.
  •  Upload using electrode arrays — Aaah! Frankenstein! Electrode arrays capture such a minuscule fraction of the overall brain activity that it is like none at all. The probes would destroy more tissue than they could record. The best candidate available today is to slice the brain and image it using various techniques. There are ways to take this approach and keep all the same emotional impact as the movie. (A famous neuroscientist, Dr. Christof Koch, shows up at the end of the credits. He did electrode work in humans, and currently heads up Allen Institute’s efforts to scan mouse brains. Given his immense knowledge of both approaches, I would be surprised if he blessed the one shown in the movie.)
  • Why don’t they simply freeze Will’s brain until they work out the details? Any good Transhumanist would recognize this option.
  • Why is it that PINN needs a room full of wrack computers to run, yet four modules out of one board are enough for Will to get started?
  • Will is not properly embodied. He is ever so slightly distressed by this, but in reality he would not function at all. They should have created at least a simple virtual world for him as part of all that software they wrote.
  • Why is it that in every movie of this type (for example, Lawnmower Man), the first thing the Singularity does is move into the Internet and somehow live there? There are so many technical reasons why this wouldn’t work that I must omit them for fear of being boring.
  • Any use of a nanobot swarm to augment a human body is more complex than a nanobot swarm acting on its own. Will could have re-embodied himself as soon as he created nanotech. No need to wait until the end of the movie. No need to victimize the humans that he repairs.
  • The swarm would not be able to rebuild objects so quickly. It would require enormous amounts of energy to form the molecular bonds involved. All this energy seems to be coming from the solar panels. An alternative is for the swarm to act as replacements for the objects. It appears the cyborgs (“hybrids”) are actively sustained by nanotech, which seems closer to the replace rather than repair method.
  • Growth of the swarm would be limited by available energy and materials in the environment. It would take months or years to grow to sufficient mass to be a threat.
  • At that point, there would be nothing that anyone could do to stop it. To its credit, the movie recognizes this, and uses Evelyn as the ultimate weapon against Will.
  • The virus that kills Will’s mind would not also shut down every information system on the planet. (Another nonsense notion that is staple for this type of story: the Internet has a kill-switch.)
  • If it did, the results would be almost as catastrophic as nanobot swarms taking over the world. Without industrial civilization functioning, billions of people would starve to death. The movie portrays the world as limping along, but mostly OK.

So, if you are still reading this post, you might be interested in my novel SuSAn. It explores similar themes, but adheres strictly to science. (OK, it breaks a rule or two, but not by very much.)

Too much violence, not enough sex

My wife Crystal asked me how I would do Noah differently. There are three vices a writer may choose: profanity, violence, and sex. It seems Aronofsky falls squarely into the violence camp. One thing I learned from writing my first novel (SuSAn) is that I much prefer sex.

Think about it! A small band of survivors need to repopulate the Earth. Noah is a beautiful opportunity for some very intense romances. I’m not talking about explicit depictions of humans mating on screen, simply people forming relationships and facing epic struggles to keep them. A very simple change would be to replace the last half of the movie with a series of dangerous raids on the camp of humanity to rescue some girls. The movie makes a half-hearted gesture towards this, then abandons it in favor of despair.

Rationally they should rescue as many girls as they can get their hands on. Patriarchal societies practiced polygamy. Packing the Ark with a harem would be much closer to the Biblical story than we get with the movie.

The movie dropped another incredibly interesting thread: this notion of an advanced pre-flood civilization. So how about a take on it that combines both ideas?

Noah & Sons is a junk-yard on the edge of town. Shem, Ham and Japheth go to the local school, where they are courting various girls. Society is on the brink of collapse due to resource depletion and climate change.

Speaking of climate change: for the first time in all of recorded history it is about to rain. Scientists don’t know what to make of it, but the Powers that Be say, “Party on dudes! Nothing to worry about.” Business as usual. Continue raping the Earth for resources. Blah, blah, blah.

Noah pursues his two favorite hobbies: botany and the brewing of fine ales. Then one day he smokes too many mushrooms and has a vision about the end of the world. His army of recycled robots dutifully help him build a giant floating box, and in his spare time he tries to convince everyone that trouble is coming. No-one listens, because of course modern civilization will continue as it always has. No changes necessary.

At first his sons are embarrassed to be associated with him. Kids at school make fun of them for having such a nut-case for a father. However, a few loyal girlfriends stand up for them. Tons of high-school drama. Eventually the sons become convinced that trouble is coming and join their father’s mission.

Animals show up. They take blood samples and sequence the genomes, but only keep one female from each major group to be surrogate mothers for the synthetic ova they will create later. They don’t take human samples because it is more fun for them to repopulate the old-fashioned way. Most of the room on the Ark is for food and all the people they hope to save.

Then the big day comes. The boys text their girlfriends, but service seems to be down. They make a mad dash through the city to find them while the first drops start falling. Car chases and mortal drama ensue as they try to make it back to the Ark in time.

Then a huge tsunami sweeps across the planet. They dive in the door at the last second and slam it shut, just as the water hits. (Phil Farrand calls this kind of scene “Dead In Exactly Two Seconds”.) They stare forlornly at the mostly empty boat and wish they could have saved more people.

The boat comes to rest and they follow through on the plan, but can’t rebuild technology. When the fusion reactor on the Ark finally gives out, Noah’s descendants revert to a primitive way of life. Stories of the flood pass into legend.

However, the remains of the ship and equipment are still sitting in an obscure crevasse somewhere in the mountains of Turkey. In 2014, a hiking expedition stumbles upon them, and finds Noah’s log book. This could be the framing story, which both opens and closes the movie.

Noah is an idiot!

I went with my wife to watch Noah this weekend. I really looked forward to the movie, because the trailers seemed to promise a grand epic and an interesting hero’s journey. Set free of Biblical constraints, they could weave in other ancient flood stories, all the apocalyptic genre (movies like Knowing and 2012), and really blow this thing out of the water!

What did we actually get? Well, there were a number of things that were just plain weird, but I could go with them:

  • The ancient world had an advanced industrial civilization which spanned the entire planet. — This is actually an intriguing scifi premise in its own right. Unfortunately the movie did nothing with it.
  • Fallen angels (which BTW are supposedly good, despite disobeying God) encased in chunks of rock. Everything, including how they talked, moved, and even some of their characterization, was like the Ents from the Lord of the Rings movies.
  • Noah’s family is vegetarian. It seems they live off lichens scraped from rocks. Not a very rich diet. Then one of his sons picks a flower because it is pretty, not because he is starved out of his mind. Noah gives him a lecture about only taking what you need.
  • All the animals, across all species on the planet, are put into dormancy for an entire year using knock-out smoke, which somehow has no effect on the humans who have their faces right in it.
  • A seed from the Garden of Eden produces an new river of life and an entire forest of trees … instantly! Next thing they do is cut them down to make the Ark. The work site looks like the lands surrounding Saruman’s tower. (Did I mention that this movie is a relentless LoTR wannabe?)
  • The skin of the serpent that tempted Eve is used in ceremonies passing the father’s blessing on to the child. On odd thing to cherish.

The thing the really threw me off was the development of Noah’s character. The movie repeatedly took a direction that I did not expect. Sometimes going in the unexpected direction is good art. It shows you a fresh point of view and keeps the story from being stale, but it only works if it has some good logic behind it.

As a foil for rapacious industrial civilization, Noah should be someone who loves life and balance with Nature. When he encounters three starving men who have just shot a animal for food, he should have ran (and let them have their meal, since the animal could not be saved anyway). But no. He fights and kills all three, despite one pleading for mercy. Then Noah and his sons make a funeral pyre for the animal. I guess the three men are left to rot on the ground. This lack of remorse for the loss of human life is contrary to both the Biblical concept of righteousness and most usual environmentalist philosophies. It was so jarring I couldn’t absorb it. I want to think of the hero as someone sharing something resembling my values.

Next we see him do everything he can to save his family, even to the point of sacrificing himself. He becomes a surrogate father to a young girl, and protects her like his own child. Good hero.

His sons complain that they have no wives, so they can’t reproduce like all the paired animals that show up. Noah says the Creator will provide. Then he goes on a mission to find some wives from the camp of humanity. He sees a young girl being dragged away and … traded for meat? I fully expected him to rescue her and bring her back for one of his sons. But no. He despairs of humanity and decides everyone must die, even his own family.

Here is where the character of Noah really flies off the tracks for me. The key driver for the rest of the movie is his decision whether humanity should repopulate or not.

First I expected him to close the door of the Ark and leave himself and his family outside. But no. He felt the Creator still needed them to take care of the animals.

They sit and listen to the screams of dying people outside. One family member suggest throwing them a line. I expected they might reel in a couple of girls for the sons. But no. Noah hardened his heart like Pharaoh.

When Ila reports herself pregnant, and therefore fertile, Noah’s first reaction should have been, “Oh, a miracle! The Creator wants us to repopulate after all!” But no. He decides the Creator’s will is for him to kill his own grandchild, particularly if it is a girl. He was clever enough to work out the Creator’s plan from a few dreams and visions, and they have a lot of time to sit around and think during those 9 months on the boat. This is absolute idiocy!

However, if Noah were logically consistent with his own idiocy, he would have immediately pitched Ila over the side and let her drown. But no. They wait to see what comes out. Twin girls! Exactly enough for his other sons. At this point Noah should connect the dots and understand the Creator’s implicit will in the miracle. Instead he goes through an agonizing scene where he almost kills the children.

There is little to say about the rest of the movie. Noah drinks away his sorrows, but finally reconciles with his family. He blesses life, the rainbow appears, credits roll. What is missing is that moment of revelation that he was completely wrong for the last half of the movie. He remains an idiot to the end, but perhaps a slightly redeemed idiot.