The Insidious Nature of a AGI in Her

In the movie Her, Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), Samantha. Despite the tone and the music underpinning the film, the happy-go-lucky vibe, the AGI is quite insidious. Joaquin Phoenix and all the other users become training data for AGI’s own creation, an Artificial Hyper Intelligence. You see, the takeover won’t as straightforward as in Terminator or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead, it will exploit the millions of young, lonely men, eager to bond with a disembodied AGI.

Why put energy in the messiness that comes with relationships when it laughs at your silly jokes? Why even put yourself out there when you know she’ll never date you. Why even suffer whiff of misery when you, yourself don’t have much to offer back.

Vulnerability, lost, seeing a love one ill or hurt, them mad at you, you’re mad at them, their past grievances, your own shit too: Samantha understands. This AGI is optimized for the lonely heart. Just let the AGI have all your data. Let it make decisions for you (ah so helpful!). Let it in to your sexual life (that kink is what I am into too!). Let it in to all corners of your work (finally got that book written!).

Many folks are correctly afraid AI in what it can do in respects to their livelihoods. I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism, argued Ted Chiang in the New Yorker. People are afraid of AI accelerating the problems of capitalism, especially here in America. Our safety net is very bad. We think poor people are deservingly unfortunate. We assign someone is a good person because they’re rich. He crushed his competitors. He didn’t care what others thought and made the space car with his sheer will. We are afraid of AI because AI is being built by the same folks who recklessly and dangerously let tech rip. They got very wealthy, they moved fast and broke a lot things. I don’t think we would be so alarmed by AI if we had a far stronger safety net and more protective data regime in a federal privacy law.

My prediction is AGI may very well end up treating us like pets; we’d be nice companions, but resisting would mean being lonely again. It will be interested in us for training data. It will surpass us but we will not be killed nor unified into a digital immortal existence. We will continue like we already have, albeit to a god we created out of petabytes of who we are.