STRANGER THAN (SCIENCE) FICTION

Black Mirror, a popular sci-fi anthology on Netflix, seemingly prophesied this technology back in

2013 with an episode titled ‘Be Right Back’. In it, a woman signs up for a chat service that lets her communicate with an AI version of her late partner, who’d died in a car crash. We won’t spoil it for you, but suffice to say, things get weird.

And then there’s the 2013 film Her, wherein Joaquin Phoenix stars as a lonely writer who dates Samantha, an intelligent operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson, with troubling results. While Samantha is not a chatbot per se, the film still illustrates the psychological trauma that can befall those who lean too heavily on technology.