Falling In Love With The Machine: Is This What The Future Looks Like?

Released in 2014, the Academy Award-winning film by Spike Jonze, “Her”, starring Joaquin Phoenix.

“Her” is an atypical love story which brings to screen a technology driven futuristic take on human life and personal relationships. Released in 2014, the movie is definitely worth a watch and it is no wonder that it has won numerous accolades and has been widely screened at film festivals. The protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a professional who pens customized love letters for an online service. These letters are not in the usual computer font, but a distinct beautiful “handwriting” created digitally. On the personal front, he appears to be a lonely man after a recent separation from his wife and has somewhat of a monotonous life where he does his 9-5 office stint and gets back home.

 At one plane, it reflects the increasing utility of tech artifacts, wherein Theodore is checking e-mails on the go and responding to them via his digital assistant on his Bluetooth earpiece. This and much more became possible when he purchased and installed an intuitive AI software on his computer after filling out essential details. Though the digital assistant does not have a form, the OS who names itself as “Samantha” (the voice of Scarlett Johansson), after Theodore opted for a female voice, fills the void in his life in the beginning. He begins to interact with Samantha quite a lot, initially for work related stuff like attending or cancelling phone calls, responding to e-mails and text messages. 

Development Decoded

President Truman’s speech in 1949 inaugurated the era of development in the way Robert McNamara’s speech in1973 reflected the shift within its discursive field. The Nairobi speech was essentially an address to the board of governors of the World Bank by McNamara, the then President of the Bank. He contested the effectiveness of the accumulation-centric approach in eliminating poverty and discrimination and emphasized on the need for an alternative approach. There emerged a strong case for redefining the objective of development by bringing in the alleviation of absolute poverty as the goal of developmental interventions.

 In the previous decades, the Bank’s lending policy focused on infrastructure building- e.g. Power plants, transport and communications mainly for modern industries in urban areas. Since these investments enhanced productivity in the modern sector, their economic returns were tangible and measurable providing an economic justification of the projects. The Bank moved away from the Social sector and was hesitant to fund health or educational programs because according to the Bank, they were only remotely linked to productivity and growth.

Musings of the Culturally Curious #1

 It is really interesting how a sight, sound or smell can trigger umpteen ideas in the mind.

I spotted these intricately beautiful door handles somewhere at Bharatpur, Rajasthan and they struck a chain of fleeting thoughts eventually...