Would you date a fake chick? That's the premise of a new movie, Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix where he falls in love with a computer-generated person. Is this a sneak peek into our future?
“I'll bet you somebody read Ray Kurzweil [director of engineering at Google] and wrote this based off of the predictions that he makes,” Glenn said on radio this morning of the new film. “This is exactly the scenario. And let's play the trailer, and you'll have to listen. Joaquin Phoenix comes into his home and the voice that he hears is not real. She is a synthesized computer that reads into everything.”
One of the creepier aspects of the trailer comes when Joaquin Phoenix’s character tells the computer (aka Samantha) that he loves the way she looks at world. In reality, she looks at the world the way he wants her to look at the world – she a figment of a computer he has programmed.
“He answered all those questions and then they programmed it to look at the way the world he does,” Pat explained. “This is just a movie right now, but it's not that far off. According to Kurzweil we're, what, 10 years from this?”
“I said to Ray, ‘Hang on just a second. You’ll be able to know exactly what I'm doing with a search engine? You'll be able to monitor my whole life? You'll know exactly what I'm thinking.’ So let's not even talk about how spooky that is if you ever get in bed with the government – I said, ‘Let's look at this as, why would Google ever allow me to make a new search engine better than Google?’ Why would anybody do that? Google won't. If they know that I am coming up and I am starting to be a competitor, they will frustrate me and stop me.”
Just last week, Google crashed for 5 minutes and there was a 40% drop in global Internet traffic. Figuratively we all know the reach and scope of Google, but that singular event literally showed the power it commands.
“How do you get off Google,” Glenn asked. “If they already control 40% of the world's traffic, and then they control your town, and they have absolutely everything wired through Google fiber? I mean you're not getting away from them. You're just not getting away from them. But don't worry. Your fake girlfriend at home will say, ‘Don't worry about Google. They're your friend.’”
