In the 2013 Spike Jonze film "Her," Theodore (played brilliantly by Joaquin Phoenix) is a lonely writer who begins interacting with an AI system that names itself Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Spoiler Alert: As the operating system expands its capabilities via artificial "learning," Theodore becomes fully emotionally involved with the technology. Meta wants to make this into a reality. Mark Zuckerberg went on a recent media tour to promote that Meta is seeking to transform its Meta AI chatbots into friends, under the guise of helping the very real loneliness epidemic. He shared on a podcast, "The average American has, I think, it's fewer than three friends… And the average person has demand for meaningfully more," guessing that desired number at around 15.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I was 21 when I first watched Spike Jonze's 2013 sci-fi romance Her in theaters in New York City--a then–fresh college graduate teeming with the potent and deluded optimism that came with being a very broke and online millennial hoping to change the world. Her sparked some of my first reflections about whether tech innovation is inherently good or bad for society, and helped validate my early moral quandaries and panic at the time. I was graduating at the first turn of a recovering recession (mainly due to big tech investments in digital and social media) and securing my first full-time role as an online reporter. Though I was eager and rosy, a quiet, worried voice also began growing inside of me. Me, my job, my realities, were entirely dependent on tech--mainly Facebook content dissemination and programmatic turnkey digital ads--and I was not sure these huge tech investments by our broligarchical founding fathers would lead us anywhere good.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Let's get this out of the way: OpenAI's voice assistant doesn't sound that much like Scarlett Johansson. The movie star has alleged that, though she rebuffed multiple attempts by Sam Altman, the company's CEO, to license her voice for the product that it demoed last week, the one it ended up using was "eerily similar" to her own. Not everyone finds the similarity so eerie--to my ear, it lacks her distinctive smoky rasp--but at the very least, the new AI does appear to imitate the playful lilts and cadences that Johansson used while playing Samantha, the digital assistant in the 2013 film Her. That's depressing--and not only because OpenAI may have run roughshod over Johansson's wishes, but because it has made such an unimaginative choice.

When Spike Jonze's Her came out in 2013, the film about a lonely man falling for an artificially intelligent operating system won widespread praise. Watching today, the qualities critics celebrated at the time are still there--it's a gentle, enjoyably melancholy story, twee but not damnably so--but something else stands out. Though set in the near-future, Her captures Obama-era techno-optimism better than any other movie. It's a time capsule, preserving dreams about the future that appear more naive the further we get from the 2010s. Her takes place in a highly-stylized version of Los Angeles from a future near enough that its protagonist is a former LA Weekly journalist but distant enough that the skyline rivals Shanghai.

Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown remarkable reasoning performance using explanations (or ``chain-of-thought'' (CoT)) for in-context learning. On the other hand, these reasoning tasks are usually presumed to be more approachable for symbolic programming. To make progress towards understanding in-context learning, we curate synthetic datasets containing equivalent (natural, symbolic) data pairs, where symbolic examples contain first-order logic rules and predicates from knowledge bases (KBs). Then we revisit neuro-symbolic approaches and use Language Models as Logic Programmer (LMLP) that learns from demonstrations containing logic rules and corresponding examples to iteratively reason over KBs, recovering Prolog's backward chaining algorithm. Comprehensive experiments are included to systematically compare LMLP with CoT in deductive reasoning settings, showing that LMLP enjoys more than 25% higher accuracy than CoT on length generalization benchmarks even with fewer parameters.

Matt Harrison runs MetaSnake, a Python and Data Science consultancy and corporate training shop. In the past, he has worked across the domains of search, build management and testing, business intelligence, and storage. He has presented and taught tutorials at conferences such as Strata, SciPy, SCALE, PyCON, and OSCON as well as local user conferences. The structure and content of his books are based on first-hand experience teaching Python to many individuals.

When the movie Her was released back in 2013, the concept of love between a human and a virtual entity was one that many people, myself included, had never really given much thought to. But as we watched the relationship blossom between Theodore, a recently-divorced writer struggling with loneliness, and Samantha, his charismatic and surprisingly empathetic operating system assistant, many of us began to wonder: Could this ever be possible? Fast-forward to today and this question isn't as far-fetched as it once may have seemed, thanks largely to the efforts of London-based software firm Spirit AI. While they have made a name for themselves using artificial intelligence to keep cyberbullying in check, they have also used this same technology to bring us 50 steps closer to the world of Her with Character Engine. Designed for videogame developers who understand the power of character to drive a story, Character Engine is an authoring tool and SDK that uses natural language processing and machine learning to create virtual personas who not only seem humanlike, but also process their environments in remarkably human ways.

I'm sitting on a grubby hotel carpet, eyes closed, hands extended in front of me, waiting to die. I'm playing an artificial intelligence in a live-action role-playing game (larp), and my human counterpart has the legal right to murder me if he wants. Or, looking at it another way, he can choose to scrub the code on a faulty experiment and start over. Within the game, he's participating in a commercial software trial for an AI -- me -- that's been developed to suit his emotional needs. If he doesn't think I'm serving those needs well enough, he can reset me to my factory defaults. With a casual tap on my outstretched hands, he can instruct me to forget all our previous interactions and become a friendly blank, eager to help him face his issues. That power imbalance between us, that feeling of being a sentient being entirely in another player's control, is at the core of a number of role-playing games that explore what it might be like to be an artificial intelligence.

Among the scant books in my tiny rented room in San Francisco, I've kept a spine-worn copy of Romeo and Juliet. It's the one I read in my high school English class, the pages yellowed, the margins filled with scribbled notes. Since the play was written in the 1590s, Shakespeare's portrayal of the nature of love--irrational, all-consuming--has been told and retold in countless movie adaptations. I hold onto the book to revisit those insights, and also because I'm prone to nostalgic literary tendencies like keeping old books. I am also a personal tech writer in 2018. It's my job to keep tabs on how our rapidly shifting technology is shaping not only how we communicate, but how we empathize, trust, show affection.

When I was a teenager, I used to enjoy watching a weekly television programme called "Lost in Space". In this science fiction series, a robot having a male identity was used as one of the main characters. He spoke perfect English but his speech sounded monotonic and dull – devoid of inflexions, and variations of volume and tone. This depiction of robots as sounding devoid of human emotions was not uncommon at that time – perhaps film producers felt the need to reinforce the differences between humans and machines. However, in a recent film called Her (released in 2014), the main character, named Theodore, uses an AI operating system that speaks conversational language.