Christian's Clarity is Kind of...Cool.

It's always discussed in hushed or sarcastic tones by soccer moms about their children, or girlfriends about their jerk boyfriends to be, about how absent minded and inattentive our human interactions can be. Studies have shown that we can spend up to 23 hours online per week, and while people have tried to decrease online use in favor of face to face contact, instead people report to be increasing online use each year. So, while so many people are focused on machines becoming like us, maybe it's time for us to realize that Christian's right and that we are becoming more like them. In the way that he talks about texting and our reliant on auto-correct. That it almost sad that our phones know what we want to say, sometimes before we know ourselves and can in some cases suggest a better way for us to say it. We in a way, make it easier for them to be like us, because we have become so much like them. In the movie, her we see Theodore's wife yell at him for dating an AI, claiming that it was yet another way that he was avoiding real feelings and anything real. While, I'm sure that what he felt for Sam was real, there was still something about it that wasn't. Yet, weirdly enough, I felt like it was always Theodore that wasn't being real or robotic in the relationship. To me, I always felt as though he was the one that had to prove he was capable of feelings and not just predicting or going through relationships properly. I mean even when he went on the date with the girl, played by Olivia Wilde, he even talked about his fear that he had already felt all that he was meant to feel. To me, that was oddly unreflective of the human spirit, and while it was obviously the depression and alcohol talking, it was the first time that I'd seen any sort of real emotion other than sadness in him, which was fear of loneliness. What's more human than that?! Oh, yeah, our desire to be loved by someone and have that be our only one. That we saw in the movie too. However, more to the point, I felt like Theodore was a human that had learned humans well but was more machine because he wasn't capable of feeling anything up to a point, and he was just performing rather than living. He was predicting, he wrote letters for people, telling them what they wanted to hear, advanced in the language of love and yet not able to fall himself, there's some sort of outsider feel to it. The way I see it, the reason that it's so easy for these people in the movie to fall for A.I.s is due to the same reason that Epstein fell for Ivana, it’s because they're looking for love to the simplest degree. Also, just like Epstein, he felt an eroded sense of trust. Just like Christian says, "I hate that when I get messages from my friends I have to spend at least a modicum of energy, at least for the first few sentences, deciding whether it's really them writing. We go through digital life in the twenty first century with our guards up. All communication is a Turing test. All communication is suspect." It's hard for us to tell now, and the reality of it is we're letting it happen because it's easy. It's easier to be machines and not feel things and be totally logical and correct, but it's harder to sound stupid, admit to mistakes, and be emotional. It's tempting to live your life like a robot or a machine, and yes machines make our lives easier. I am not at all saying that we should give them up. What I am saying is to be more present, and less predictable. Don't waste time hiding behind your phones auto-corrected messages and take risks and chances face to face, it's more fun being human, even though it's less work being a robot.
    
My favorite part of the book was the epilogue, mostly because it captures the essence of what having A.I.s would mean at least from my perspective. As Christian states, "I love these moments in theory, the models, the approximations, as good as they are aren't good enough. You simply must watch. Ah, so this is how nature does it. This is what it looks like. I think it is important to know these things. To know what can't be simulated, can't be made up, can't be imagined-and to seek it." To me that's an accurate description of what the existence of A.I.s would mean. It would just spark further introspection into ourselves and all that makes us human, and possibly cause us to do much like as Christian described his friend does, "pay a kind of religious attention to the natural world." Maybe we can stop looking for constant advancement, more intelligence or efficiency. One thing that I remember most after three years in college, was in Dr. Vogl’s cognitive psychology class, he explained to us that the chainsaw was invented due to some guy trying to figure out how to cut wood. This guy had wound up getting frustrated, took a walk to get some fresh air, and saw some termites and based the chainsaw off their jaw structures. Then said, that's a lot like psychology, watching a process happen in nature, and then looking at how it happens and how you can apply it. Maybe the introduction of A.I.s will cause us to look back at the nature, and realize that as good as the A.I.s are, it's just not something to be imitated or replicated and it'll never be the same. In fact, I remember as a kid, at one point I wanted to be an AI. There was this Disney Channel movie called, Pixel Perfect, and it was about a girl that was a computer and she was in love with her creator and his best friend was in love with him too. By the end, the story showed that the while the girl was jealous of the AI the AI had always been jealous of the girl, and felt trapped and unreal. In fact, that's usually how all Disney Channel movies depicted A.I.s, even in Smart House, they always showed us that as perfect as the A.I.s were, they still weren't human and deep down they always wanted to be. It's like Pinocchio, but a little more twenty first century. And while it is a little ethnocentric, it comes from that human entitlement that Christian mentioned before. In the end, as romantic as his ideals maybe, I do agree with Christian to a degree and want to stay hopeful about our future with or without A.I.s. I guess I still believe in the human spirit and humanity. That we will always, like we did with technology, learn to adapt and integrate new ideas and innovations without hesitation. All while still trying to hold on and appreciate all the things that we could never recreate, because it's nature's creation and there's no imitating it, but instead learning we should just notice and appreciate that's it's here for us to enjoy. Cause nothing lasts forever, not even us.