Conscious AI Will Give Us Meaningful Relationships

By now, everyone's familiar with the tale: Artificial intelligence achieves consciousness, judges that humans are extraneous, and then enslaves or destroys us all. Think 2015's Ex Machina, 2004's I, Robot, 1984's Terminator. The other side of the coin, though, tends to make fewer headlines. Spike Jonze's 2013 film Her offers a sweeter narrative about conscious A.I.: A future in which a lonely writer can fall in love with an A.I. assistant named Samantha. Her eventual transition from conscious to superintelligent does not signal the demise of our species -- it just breaks Joaquin Phoenix's heart.