AI

The new movie "her" (it doesn't sound that interesting) has the thesis that a man falls in love with an AI. I gather the AI programmers are getting more and more sophisticated, and of course the speech recognition and voice reconstruction is better and better. And if it talks like a woman... um, no. It may be a good parody, but the AI is a predictable construct.

I gather Frank Herbert wanted to avoid predicting the future of computing and instead deal entirely with living characters, so in Dune's Orange Catholic Bible it says "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." One of our little gods is intellect--it is an article of faith that we know more and are wiser than all humanity before us. So I suppose we like to construct idols of intellect. But it isn't logical to draw conclusions about the nature of humans' intelligence from the nature of imitations.