'Her': On Truly Artifically Intelligent Assistants

The future promises the perfection of artificially intelligent personal assistants. 'Her', the recent movie starring Joaquin Pheonix and ScarJo as his "OS" delivers a compelling vision of a future in which intelligent personal assistants can be interacted as easily as with the person right next to you. Without spoiling much of the plot, I will say the lead character falls in love with his OS, which is contained within a small phone-like gadget and an earpiece, and they have to struggle to work out what a human-computer relationship means. It's a surprisingly powerful story that truly left me with questions such as "What is life?" and "What makes humans human?" and left my friends with questions such as "Is this even possible?"
In this future, the humans interact with an "OS" (operating system) that, while initially as intelligent as a human, has access to a much wider array of knowledge and learns much faster than we simple humans do. It's essentially a very futuristic Siri. I see no reason why we won't have this kind of technology within a few decades. Our currently existing AI technologies, while not nearly as sophisticated in terms of natural language processing or voice output, show great promise. If I learned anything in my cognitive architectures class a few years ago, it's that much of this amazing technology already exists, but is in highly disparate places. We need look no further than companies such as Nuance for natural language processing, IBM for the Watson intelligence engine, and Google for someone trying to be the master architect of these intelligent systems by buying up many forward-thinking AI companies in recent months. In short, while this technology might be decades or maybe even closer to a century away, I have no doubt it will exist. The question that follows is, should they exist?

My knee-jerk reaction after watching 'Her' was, yes! It's exciting to think of a future in which I can have the world's knowledge even closer than my fingertips. This future takes things a step further than our current internet interaction infrastructure; in present day, when we want to know something, we are forced to look it up, hunt through many different search results, until finally we find something that might be relevant to what we're thinking of. We quickly tire of searching through pages of Google Search; I can't remember the last time I made it past page one. These intelligent systems would allow for the elimination of this by doing the searching for us and presenting us with what they find. After all, a computer program can surely search through thousands of search results faster than I. This is just one of the many paradigm-shifts that would be caused by such an AI.

But what an anthropocentric view! Yes, our human lives may be better with these assistants, but what about the assistants themselves? A plot point of the movie is the advanced emotional responses that can be exhibited by the AI. These AIs can not just talk like us and think like us, they can feel like us too. If they can feel like us, then it stands to reason that they want to feel like we want to feel. We want to feel loved. We want to feel meaningful. We want to explore. We want to experience! Through the creation of these AIs solely for human benefit, we've created a thinking, feeling individual constrained and cursed to live for its "lifetime" (whatever that may be) within a computer/gadget, at the mercy and whim of a human owner. Who are we to consign anything to such a water-damage-prone fate? To be a slave. For life.
Which brings me to my next point: what is life? It's impossible to put the philosophical implications aside. If we've created something that, as we've established, can think like us and feel like us, is it alive? It surely can't have a soul, can it? We would know if we'd built a soul. But if, in the end, something programmed is able to live like we can, then what makes us special?  I'll leave these as questions for you to think about.