Of course, we don't need Spike Jonze to tell us that technology is fundamentally changing the way that we relate to each other. In the film Her, Samantha is relentlessly interested in Theodore and laughs at all his jokes, and as Theodore's ex-wife puts it when he confesses his love for the OS, he now has "a wife without the challenge of dealing with anything real". Their capacity to engage will be so compelling that you might forget that it's merely a service that you bought on the promise of being compelling. They'll be endlessly inventive, capable of composing poetry, music and art that's guaranteed to make you laugh, cry or both. Tell them you love them, and they'll always return the compliment, never ignoring you and never admonishing you for forgetting to buy toilet paper. Fidelity wouldn't appear to be an issue, as they're conveniently imprisoned within a box, either on your desk or in a data centre somewhere in Nebraska. They'll mysteriously anticipate your need for reassurance when you're feeling less than 100 per cent. These OSs will always reply instantly, because your priorities are paramount these replies will never sound weary or distracted, or have worrying subtexts that you have to spend hours trying to decipher. Humans will probably find it hard to match the levels of thoughtfulness and understanding offered by advanced operating systems of the future. One man admitted that he considered the character in the Nintendo dating game 'Love Plus' to be his girlfriend He experienced perfect understanding without judgement for the first time, and he found it unexpectedly seductive. The contrast between that and real life – the often excruciating dance of courtship where the motivations and characters of both parties seem to be constantly shifting and perpetually opaque, would have been instantly apparent to Theodore. She absorbs his entire email history and diary contents within a couple of seconds Theodore instantly becomes an open book to her, but she's not perturbed by any of the revelations she may have stumbled across. There's an instant click, because instant click is what Samantha's programmed to provide. Theodore gets over his initial hesitancy with her (it somehow seems wrong to call "her" an "it") almost immediately. But Samantha, the operating system in Her, is a different matter. ![]() When you consider Nintendo's Love Plus, one obvious answer to that question lies in Nene's limited vocabulary and stultifying lack of spontaneity which would drive most people up the wall within a week. At the start of the documentary, with a note of sarcasm, cultural commentator Roland Kelts asks: "Why would you get into something as messy as a relationship when you can have a virtual girlfriend?" She projects the most unthreatening and compliant notion of a romantic partner imaginable. ![]() There's something faintly tragic about the sequence the character within the app, Nene, is a typical Manga-style girl with big eyes, short skirts and a kooky manner, forever proclaiming her love and showing endless enthusiasm for having "fun". "It's the kind of relationship I wish I'd had in high school." One of them considered the character to be his girlfriend the other kept her a secret from his wife. It included a segment that focused on two men in their late thirties who had become attracted to characters within a Nintendo dating simulation title called Love Plus. ![]() A BBC documentary that screened late last year, No Sex Please We're Japanese, looked at the reasons for the plummeting birth rate in Japan, and why men in particular are shunning conventional relationships.
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