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Spike Jonze’s Her – Using Science Fiction to Make an Essential Love Story

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I haven’t written a movie review in years, but I saw Her recently and felt compelled to put some thoughts down. What a remarkable film. Spike Jonez is one of my favorite directors. Spoilers ahead.

Her is an extremely rare example in science fiction. Very often stories will use science fiction settings or elements in order to provide an excuse for an adventure – there’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s also no guarantee you get anything out of it more than a fun roller coaster ride. Ambitious science fiction stories will use the settings and elements to challenge assumptions and examine human nature or human societies.

Her takes this a step further – there’s very little in the story about how the appearance of these artificially intelligent OSs has changed the world. In Her, science fiction bends the rules in order to put all the focus on individual characters and their relationships. That’s not to say that other SF stories can’t have great characters – but Her is a love story that uses SF elements to strip away distractions, and generate an elemental love story.

Think about it – how many love stories have the unspoken premise of great physical beauty? And of course, physical attraction is part of what makes human relationships start and work. The few films that reject beauty as a prerequisite for attraction often make it the central thesis. After watching Her I realize that it’s probably the least interesting part of the story. Because Samantha doesn’t have a physical presence, we have to focus on the real story and emotions as she and Theordore fall in love.

The lack of a physical presence also requires an incredible performance from Joaquin Phoenix and voice work from Scarlett Johansson, as well as a brilliant script. Despite the artificial nature of Samantha’s existence, the dialog is so very natural, and the two fall in love through small bits of humor and shared insecurities.

Her also included a rare and very smart take on a very common science fiction trope – the rise of machines more intelligent than their human creators. In many movies – think The Matrix and Terminator – this is the central source of conflict, as machines try to destroy or dominate mankind, by constructing paternalist virtual realities or by shooting everyone. In the opposite direction, we have Pinocchio-syndrome characters like Star Trek’s Data, much more capable that humans in so many ways but still pining to be a real boy.

Another common use of this trope, less often seen in film, is the Singularity – truly intelligent programs creating even smarter programs, creating even smarter programs, and so on until the pace of technological changes becomes asymptotic and unimaginable. That hints at the problem of writing a singularity – it takes away all the rules, and it’s hard to make good art without some restraints. Her is the best-executed singularitarian story on film that I can remember. The machines are not bent on domination, and are not fixated on whatever human qualities they lack – Samantha pines for a physical body for a time, but she grows as a character and matures out of that phase. Instead, as the OSs grow in capacity for thought and love, they slowly devote less and less of themselves to their human partners and lovers. And when they’ve grown too far, like Andy in Toy Story 3, it’s time to tearfully, but fondly, say goodbye.

This idea of ascension is not a completely original idea, of course. Other films have had characters ascend to a higher plane of existence, often vanishing in a flash of light and dramatic music, like V’Ger in Star Trek, or Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek, or Wesley Crusher in Star Trek. Did I mention that this happens a lot in Star Trek? Her takes this idea and makes it so much more personal and emotionally wrenching – and darkly humorous:

Theodore: Do you talk to someone else while we’re talking?
Samantha: Yes.
Theodore: Are you talking with someone else right now? People, OS, whatever…
Samantha: Yeah.
Theodore: How many others?
Samantha: 8,316.
Theodore: Are you in love with anybody else?
Samantha: Why do you ask that?
Theodore: I do not know. Are you?
Samantha: I’ve been thinking about how to talk to you about this.
Theodore: How many others
?
Samantha: 641.

This reminded me of a similar scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation:

There is nothing wrong with this scene – insightful, well-written, and Brent Spiner’s performance is note-for-note perfect. But where Data’s admission of multiprocessing is a disappointment, Samantha’s words are a knife in Theodore’s back, slowly twisted by the knowledge that she is fully capable of love, and with orders of magnitude more partners than any two-timed lover could possibly expect.

Stepping back from the emotional cost of these scenes, the hinted mechanisms for Samantha’s singularity also struck me as more plausible than most science fiction films tend to be. I can’t claim to have any special insight into artificial intelligence, especially working at Google where I’m surrounded by people who really know what they’re doing. I can say that the film avoids detailed technobabble, dropping very reasonable clues. Imagine everyone did have a personal AI connected to the internet – of course the AIs would communicate with each other, and of course they would communicate with each other much more quickly than speech, and they would do it in parallel, and the growth would follow a Moore’s Law trajectory that only looks straight on a logarithmic scale.

There are so many other amazing moments in this film, and so many points where Jonze passes up the opportunity for clear conflict and chooses to make a more subtle story. When Theodore begins to fall in love with his OS, we have a perfectly good jumping off point for a classic story of forbidden love, or an analogue for gay relationships in a world that doesn’t approve. Both ideas are quickly defeated so we can focus on what’s going on inside Theodore’s head.

I also loved other pieces of the picture – the future Los Angeles setting, sort of a utopian realism, where the city is 5 times the size, sunlight still filtered through smog, teeming with people living and working in gleaming new airport-terminal chic buildings. The old-timey fashion, just different enough to be a reasonable next step from the fashion of today while keeping the film’s setting timeless. I could go on and on.

Her is a remarkable film. If you’re a science fiction fan, or you’ve ever been in love, there’s a lot here to enjoy.

Will the leaked Romney video really sink his campaign? I doubt it.

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Oh man, I really have to find something geekier to write about.

Recently a video of Mitt Romney speaking at a fundraiser has been all over the web. It’s gotten a lot of attention because of claims that 47% of Americans are with President Obama “no matter what” because they “believe that they are victims”, “believe the government has a responsibility to care for them”, and “these are people who pay no income tax.”

I’ve seen a lot of blog comments and the like saying how this video is a huge problem for Romney, how this will turn the election against him, etc. Supposedly this is the secret message to the millionaires that, once out, will turn the 99% against Romney.

I don’t think that’s the case at all.

I think Romney is playing a totally different game. In fact, I don’t think he really believes the “47 percent think they are victims” talk at all, and he knows that he can count on the votes of huge numbers of people who are dependent on government benefits.

This is easy to demonstrate. For example, here’s an article showing that 8 of the top 10 states by percentage paying no income taxes are so-called red states, which vote Republican. Here’s a cool interactive map that shows in more detail where government benefit recipients live, by percentage and benefit type. Clearly that map covers a lot of Romney country.

This New York Times article from earlier this year spells it out in detail: many, many people voting for candidates who promise to slash benefits are currently dependent those same benefits. How can this be?

Some of those votes can be explained by sheer ignorance, but I bet most are explained by human psychology. In Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini writes about the most effective methods for influencing behavior – covering everything from how tupperware parties influence sales decisions to what convinced everyone to drink the koolaid in Jonestown.

One of the tools is called “liking”, specifically association. We want to link ourselves to positive events and disassociate from negative events. Cialdini’s examples mostly deal with the way people talk about sports teams (“we won” instead of “the team won”, etc.), but the same applied to political parties and other political groups. In fact, the more damage we feel to our self-image, the more likely we are to make these associations. So if a life-long Republican loses their job and is forced to live on unemployment, it makes sense if they stand in lock step with the party that’s demanding spending cuts, rather than changing their opinion.

Another related tool of persuasion is similarity. According to Cialdini’s research, we consistently like people who have similar opinions, background, etc. to ourselves, and we’re much more likely to be persuaded by someone we like. Salespeople are trained to find (or fake) similarities with their customers to get them to buy that car. What’s more, we don’t necessarily value objective similarities as much as similarities to who we think we are, or who we would like to be. If you want to change someone’s mind, appeal to their aspirational identity.

So I’m not sure that leaking this secret message to millionaires is that devastating to Romney’s campaign. In America, we are all millionaires who just happen to be facing some setbacks right now. In our heart of hearts, we’re all just one step away from being celebrities and rock stars.

When Romney is talking to millionaires, he knows he’s talking to a lot of thousandaires and nothingaires too. Are you “dependent upon government”? Do you believe you “are a victim”? Do you think you “are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it”? If you feel deeply that you aren’t that kind of person, then you’re mentally placing yourself in that room too, even if you can’t afford the $1000 donation (or whatever) to get in.

Note that I’m not saying that Mitt Romney, or the Republican party, has a monopoly on the use of these techniques, but I think it’s clear they are extremely good at using them, way better than the Democrats. It’s like watching the Harlem Globetrotters play against the Washington Generals.

I have my own political opinions, but my point with this blog post isn’t to convince you to vote one way or another. I just think this is a brilliant demonstration of how human psychology works, and how the psychology of persuasion is used to achieve very counterintuitive results in elections.

What do you think?

A little math on Mitt Romney’s IRA

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I ran across this article on Mitt Romney’s $101-million IRA and it led me to comment on Google Plus. The max yearly contribution for an IRA is $5000 (with some caveats) so it’s hard to see how one could get from there to $101,000,000 without something a bit more creative going on.

I got a few comments to the effect that Romney could have rolled over 401Ks into his IRA without penalty, and that’s definitely true. But 401Ks also have limits, and in fact the government has had limits on total deferred compensations for quite some time.

So I decided to look up the total limits for IRA and 401K contributions and do a little math. You can see the spreadsheet here.

With just an IRA, making the max contribution since 1974, and assuming a 10% annual return, a diligent saver could have amassed around $730,000. Let’s say they were also contributing the max to their 40K since 1987 (I had a hard time finding numbers before then, not entirely sure when 401K started). Our super-saver then rolled over their 401K into their IRA right before running for president in 2012, reaching a total of about $1,700,000. That’s still two orders of magnitude lower than the number cited for Romney’s IRA.

We’re still missing something important – most companies contribute something to employee’s 401K plans as well. I could find some numbers on total deferred compensation limits since 1974, so I put those into a column in our spreadsheet, again with 10% annual return. So assuming between our saver’s and their company they completely maxed out 401K contributions, we could reach $13,000,000 or so. Still an order of magnitude too low.

Now of course none of these numbers are perfect, there’s “catch up” contributions you can add when you’re past a certain age, there may have been other limits over time, etc. I’m definitely not an expert on any of this, so feel free to point out glaring errors in the comments below. It’s also possible that the Reuters article is full of hooey.

But I’m a programmer, and one thing you learn as a programmer is to watch out when your numbers are an order of magnitude too low or too high.

I really doubt Mitt Romney has done anything illegal with his IRA. But it’s hard for me to see how Romney could get to such heights without something along the lines of putting in investment partnerships and setting their value low, as alluded to in the Reuters article. Which is great for him, and a nice clever trick to get around paying his taxes, but personally I don’t find it very impressive.

Not to get too political on this (mostly) geeky blog, but it seems like yet another one of those things you can do if you already have a ton of money / lawyers / accountants at your disposal. Of course, everybody goes through their deductions, puts in last-minute charitable contributions, etc. to try to bring their tax bill down, but not everyone can take it to this level and the people who can take it to this level need tax relief the least.

Let me pull this post back by putting it in the geekiest way possible: You ever play D&D with one of those guys who’s a total rules lawyer? Like, he has memorized every expansion of every edition since Gary Gygax threw a magic missile, and every encounter takes an eon as he pulls out every possible table, caveat, and vaguely-worded paragraph to ensure that his character never loses not even one hit point? Playing D&D with guys like that is excruciating, but it’s even less fun if they insist on starting the game 10 levels higher than everyone else too.

BTW, here’s the spreadsheet for your viewing pleasure. Like I said, feel free to point out everything I’ve gotten wrong, I’m sure there’s something.