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 simp...