Just like Joaquinn Phoenix in "Her" we all slowly started to fall in love with Scarlett Johanssons character Samantha. How I wish I had a super intelligent and witty OS to accompany me while I work I thought. Reminds me of meetings? Fantastic. Plays video games with me? T_T thank you. Makes me tea?? No? :/ Too much to ask I guess. I loved the movie by the way. I'm big on AI in general. But from a usability standpoint, I couldn't help but crack myself up at everything that would go wrong in my day if I had Samantha with me. And let's assume that Sam learns at a more human level for this scenario, and we're stuck with her for the long haul. Or at least until OS 2 comes out.
6am Wake Up Call
So maybe having Scarlett Johansson waking me up at all hours of the night to talk about book clubs and philosophizing about the meaning of existence isn't such a bad thing..once in a while. But I'll be honest, I needz my sleep. Come 6am, I don't really care who's on the other end of an earpiece. Listen..software..ladies :/ I want to hear about your day, just not at 6am. Let's save that for after that first cup of coffee sometime around noon.
This Seems Useless
"Based on my super awesome logic unit, all this stuff you kept in your inbox is probably garbage". We all need a bit of life organization sometimes. But deleting 5mb worth of emails, that I've painstakingly cataloged in my mind, is not worth the time. How about you learn what spam is and delete that as it comes in, so I don't have to click on that spam tab once a month to delete everything. I might need those daily Amazon deals emails one day :/
I Took The Liberty Of...
This is when things get a tad bit creepy for me. I'm a-ok with sharing my info with an application if there is a benefit to it, but if there was a chance that the application would start to make choices based on that info without me knowing, then I'd run for the hills. In the movie "Her", Sam usually asked our main protagonist friend if he approved on whatever actions she was about to do next. But the more the film progressed, the more she took it upon herself to make these choices for him.
End Of Day 1
So there we have it. 200$ down the drain, and a bunch of deleted emails. And a very unproductive work day. If the day ever comes when we can just download a new AI Operating System for 199$ I'll probably skip out on it and stick with the more "manual" approach where I click on things, and then events happen.
Great concept for a film though. If an OS existed with that level of AI, then yes it is a believable film. And a conflicting one at that. You're rooting for Joaquin Phoenix, and Sam is great, but she's a..different kind of being :/ and let's be honest, his character was not the most interesting person in that reality. How she didn't just refuse to turn on every morning is a mystery to me.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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