Her

  Jeez, my last post was in July last year. I swear it didn’t feel that long ago. I’m sorry. I haven’t felt all that complete in myself, and so I haven’t really had anything to write. The first year I had this blog, I put my all into it. And now? Well, now I barely write anything at all. You know that as much as I do. It’s sad. I don’t want to discuss what’s going on in the world right now, because I can guarantee that you already know. I wish it would end, I really do.

  I’ve watched a lot of movies about Artificial Intelligence, lately. I watched Ex Machina, which I personally wasn’t all that much of a fan of because the protagonist was beyond the point of insufferable. Before that, I watched Transcendence, the Johnny Depp film that pretty much nobody remembers, and of course A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the 2001 Steven Spielberg epic that I’ve been obsessed with since I saw it as a kid. Tonight I watched Her. Now Her, well... she made me feel something else.

  Growing up a fairly lonely person, I always watched A.I. and wished I had someone like Teddy, (an artificial intelligent super toy), to talk to. Obviously I never did, so my imagination had to make do. Believe me, it was rampant. Though, saying that, my brain would input slight limitations and I would adhere to them. For instance; I had an imaginary friend named Leo. He was a seven foot, fierce, but very handsome lion. He was wonderful, and when I was around him I felt less alone. Unfortunately, I could only visit him in a certain toilet stall of a specific pub called The Phoenix. I was probably kind of dumb, like most kids.

  Anyway, I watched this movie tonight and at the start I was thinking, “wow, if everyone just had one of these seemingly semi-sentient operating systems, people would be so much less lonely, and therefore happier.” But as the film continued, new problems and complications would crop up that involved actual real human feelings and emotions. Like, what if your operating system wasn’t only yours? Would it bother you if they were speaking to other people? Thousands of other people, to be more exact. I knew my answer right away would be that it would bother me.

  If this operating system wanted to learn more than what was just effectively myself, it would have to speak to new people all the time. That would then take the personal factor away from it and it would be pointless, at least to me.

  It made me think a lot, and I can’t put a tonne of it into words. I just think if more people had someone, or something, life might be a little lighter sometimes. My friend, who I haven’t seen for a few years because he did a very bad, deplorable thing, might have benefited from a thing like that. An unbiased program to talk to. But would that then cause other issues that might lead to something else? Something worse, maybe, due to a lack of filtering system designed to make the user more comfortable with sharing their deepest internal thoughts? I don’t know. I will never know. Not unless it happens one day. Until then, these are all hypotheticals.

  I wish I had an unbiased thing to talk to.

Signed,

Elijah.

Meta Sentience.

19/01/2021