I got around to watching Her this weekend, and I must say: That movie is fantastic. One of the best movies I've ever watched. It both excels as a movie about relationships, as well as a movie about AI. You could easily watch it with someone who had no experience with LessWrong, or understanding of AI, and use it as an introduction to discussing many topics.
While the movie does not really tackle AI friendliness, it does bring up many relevant topics, such as:
Intelligence Explosion. AIs getting smarter, in a relatively short time, as well as the massive difference in timescales between how fast a physical human can think, and an AI.
What it means to be a person. If you were successful in creating a friendly or close to friendly AI that was very similar to a human, would it be a person? This movie would influence people to answer 'yes' to that question.
Finally, the contrast provided between this show and some other AI movies like Terminator, where AIs are killer robots at war with humanity, could lead to discussions about friendly AI. Why is the AI in Her different from Terminators? Why are they both different from a Paperclip Maximizer? What do we have to do to get something more like the AI in Her? How can we do even better than that? Should we make an AI that is like a person, or not?
I highly recommend this movie to every LessWrong reader. And to everyone else as well, I hope that it will open up some people's minds.
I mentioned it in the Media thread. I don't find the movie "fantastic", just solid, but this might be because none of the ideas were new to me, and some of the musings about "what it means to be a person" has been a settled question for me for years now. Still, it is a good way to get people thinking about some of the transhumanist ideas.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.