Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report

A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze's new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough. After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn't a movie about technology. With that, the film took shape. Sure, it takes place in the future, but what it's really concerned with are human relationships, as fragile and complicated as they've been from the start. Of course on another level Her is very much a movie about technology. One of the two main characters is, after all, a consciousness built entirely from code.