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Comment by sourc3 | Hacker News Reader

Saw the movie this past weekend and thought it was really good. I didn't like it just because it has awesome voice driven OSes or endless battery life devices, but because it portrays a current trend we are experiencing; hyper connected loneliness.

The more people are "digitized" and tethered to their devices, the more they seek some human connection.

Don't want to ruin the movie for those who haven't seen it so I won't comment on the ending. However, I urge the HN crowd to check it out. It's one of the best movies I've seen in a while.

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I'd say the movie was entirely about today. About right now. It just used the future setting to make sure we got it.

And yeah, the part I didn't like was how unrealistic the technology was -- specifically the gap between "new" AIs and what came before, which despite the email reading and transcription, was basically today's Siri or Google Now.

It also bugged me that there were AIs before we had VR glasses or even headsets. The lack of VR implied to me that this movie again was about now, not the future. We aren't used to VR yet ourselves, and the movie was much more about humans as humans than as augmented humans -- or AIs with virtual bodies.

Don't get me started with how sometimes music would play over the sounds in the world and the only way this would happen with an AI is if you wore noise cancelling headphones 24/7 with the AI's ability to then alert you to real-world sound you're not paying attention to...

But it was fun. I'll watch it again once it's out of theatres. Probably more than once.

It's one of the best movies I've seen in a while.

Same here. Spike Jonze is a genius at forcing the characters into some subtly creepy situations that would never occur in real life (a four-person date, one of them an "OS," with the three humans wearing ear-pieces?). The actors do a great job of pretending like things are perfectly normal. And at the same time the movie touches on some real present-day challenges.

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