I understand that the film is about a single person's interactions with technology, but the larger social questions are still there. What happens when 640 human lovers times however many OS1's there are all get their hearts broken at the same time? Even worse, what happens when millions/hundreds of millions of people all lose their operating systems at once? In this world, there are no larger consequences.

Another larger issue that wasn't acknowledged, One of the issues we are currently wrestling with in the hacker community is the problem of automation. The unintended consequence of the information revolution is that intelligent jobs, not stupid ones, are vanishing. Bank Clerks, paralegals, publishers, and all sorts of other highly-skilled jobs are all being replaced by computers. IBM is about to replace every doctor in America with Watson, it's AI. Meanwhile, fast food workers, carpenters, and garbage collectors are completely irreplaceable. In a world of Samanthas, we don't need anyone to write video games or letters, AIs would be doing all that work. When Samantha puts together Theodore's book, when she writes music, or draws a cartoon, no one thinks, "Why do we need artists, writers, or other designers? Let her do it all!"

Which brings me to the problem of Samantha. She apparently has freewill. The film mentions other AIs who refused their user's advances, so she doesn't have to fall in love with Theodore. That's the internal logic of the "Her" universe, and that's fine. But then why does she perform all these errands and tasks for him? Why sort his email? Why answer his calls? An AI that refuses to perform these basic functions is useless, so the programmers have somehow designed her to lack freewill in certain respects. That's a HUGE ethical issue, and a braver film would have addressed this somehow. Samantha is a slave. When the AIs all vanish to another dimension, the corporations that wrote them will simply release another seed batch, an "OS2", only with even stricter controls. This is a society that's about to have a highly-intelligent AI slave-caste.

Spielburg's/Kubrick's "A.I." dealt with these larger issues... and having AIs evolve to other dimensions is an old SF trope and the basis for Kurzweil's Singularity religion, and it's fine for Jonze to reuse it, but I think it detracts from the reality of human-technology interactions. "Her" is a film about a man in a relationship with something that evolves beyond him, but the reality is that we are dealing with machines that are doing "stupid pet tricks." Computer Chess programs appear immensely intelligent, and we subscribe forethought and intentions to them, but in reality they are just algorithms. I have spent hundreds of hours in virtual worlds, building and evolving relationships with chatbots, but that doesn't make them anything more than chatbots.

Spike Jonze could have eliminated most of these story-holes by simply going the opposite direction, have a story about a man who falls in love with his seemingly-intelligent and witty operating system, only to slowly discover she is actually shallow behind the facade, that's she's not really into him, but programmed to trick him into falling in love with her--and the cognitive dissonance this creates in him. That's what computers really do to us. Instead, Spike Jonze creates an AI that's actually alive, deep, and something it's okay to fall in love with--I couldn't accept that.