Her

Spike Jonze's Her (2013) tells the story of a lonely, pensive letter writer in the distant future, who buys an artificially intelligent assistant, and eventually begins a romantic relationship with her. Over time, their relationship suffers as she cannot experience reality the way he can, and he cannot understand her digital life.

As a Sociology major, and someone who is active on dating apps, I think the film Her is interesting to look at with regards to digital intimacy. The digital world has brought people together in a way like never before, so our options in the dating pool have vastly increased. However, because we tend to put too much trust in profiles, it's easy to get catfished by bots just looking to extract money from a poor, desperate soul.

I have seen this movie three times total, and every time I watch it, I am weirded out by the story (as I believe was intended by the director). We seem to intrinsically understand that romantic intimacy can only be felt between two humans, and seeing it between a robot and a human is just unnatural.

To look at this film as a product of its time, Her was released when artificial intelligence like Siri was becoming more accessible to us, and depicted what we figured at the time was an extreme scenario. With the rapid changes in technology, and the way dating online is becoming increasingly more commonplace, I'm realizing that the story of Her may not be so outlandish. Nowadays, it is easy to have a conversation with artificial intelligence like Siri and Alexa, or a bot on a dating app, as though it was a normal human. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly easy for robot interaction to provide the same comforts that human interaction does.