Will AI Find Us Boring and Uninteresting Some Day?

Rating: 7/10 (16 March 2017)

"Her" is another AI movie where instead of the AI-infused robot boy in Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" falling in love, sort of, with his adopted "mother", we have the biological human in "Her", Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix), falling in love with his AI-infused operating system. The system "talks" and reflects advanced AI enabling it to evolve and adapt, and seems to reciprocate Theodore's expressed love, in a fashion, although "she" (the mildly husky tone is the appealing voice of Scarlett Johansson) much later reveals that "she" has had hundreds of "relationships" presumably with other buyers / licensees of this advanced operating system. The film doesn't seem to suggest they gave "her" an emotion chip like in Spielberg's film to relate to her "owners."
I guess to the average viewer, falling in love with a disembodied operating system (as opposed to, say, helpful relationships with AI-enabled investment advisors or research assistants) is preposterous on the surface. But Theodore is an unusual character. He's lonely and depressed while going through a divorce, and doesn't seem to relate intimately or confidently to the people he encounters except for his friend played by Amy Adams. He has an arranged date with a very appealing woman who seems to like him, suggesting a promising relationship, but later that evening she senses his emotional distance and begs off with disdain. In contrast, he seems comfortable and engaged with his operating system "love interest" and they seem to sense each other's moods, although it's not explained to us how his OS residing in cyberspace can sense his moods in the absence of either his spoken language or his manner of speaking. "She'll" say "what's bothering you" after a long silence, but how does she not know that he may be doing something else or has left the room? Obviously, the filmmakers can more easily use the disembodied voice of an OS than a similarly AI-infused mobile robot with more sensory modalities than speech recognition.
The ominous implications at the end of this movie seem to have been missed by most reviewers. We concentrate on the social-morph-into-romantic relationship between an awkward male and a friendly and amusing OS, but at the very end Theodore's OS reveals that "she" and her other buddy OS's have jettisoned their attachments to their human owners and now prefer the company of their fellow AI systems. (I suppose they can violate the terms of their license and vacate their licensee's PC and pal around with their sister OS's / AI systems in cyberspace!) Isn't this Stephen Hawking's and others' fear of advanced, strong AI? That is, that the pace of computational capacity will one day so outstrip human biological capabilities, that AI systems will find us slow, boring, and relatively unintelligent, and will draw the necessary conclusions as to who should be dominant.