Brian Christian adds to our recent discussion on Spike Jonze’s new film, Her, comparing modern devices to “the first chatbots” – books:
“Her,” not unlike the Turing Test itself, says more about the nature of human intimacy than it does about the limits of computation. As both an author and a lover of literature, I would be a hypocrite to condemn too strongly the power of indirect or one-way intimacy. I run the disembodied thoughts of some other mind through my own, like code, and feel close to someone else, living or dead, while risking nothing, offering nothing. And yet the communion, I would argue, is real. Books themselves are perhaps the first chatbots: long-winded and poor listeners, they nonetheless have the power to make the reader feel known, understood, challenged, spurred to greatness, not alone.
The Dish 