With regard to Her — the only movie on this list that I've seen — I believe the author has approached the film from the wrong direction. There's an assumption often made amongst geeks and hackers that we'll know when we create the first "true" AI. I thoroughly enjoyed Her, because the movie didn't delve in to the "who and how" details of the AI. If we strip away the assumption that we'll know when we create the first true AI, then the film's circumstances make much more sense.

Think about how applications like Siri work today. They have a very superficial appearance of AI, but they're not terribly convincing. Apple is making progress though. Siri surprises me all the time; in a good way. Periodically, I'll try something new; and occasionally, Siri delivers. It's progressive enhancement.

Fast-forward 25-50 years. Where is the line between what we have today and "true" AI? I keep quoting the word true because I believe the phrase "true AI" is apocryphal in the way the author uses it. True AI can mean many things. Two possibilities are:

1) We gain some deeper insight in to the mechanics of human consciousness, and set out to replicate that in software. When we achieve that, we've achieved "true AI".

2) We never really understand human consciousness, but we keep chasing the goal of convincing AI. That is, AI that seems human. In this chase, we achieve a convincing enough level of AI that the questions raised in the article — and in the movie — become relevant.

I believe the latter is a more likely scenario than the former.

Looking forward 25-50 years again, let's examine a future where Megacorp™ keeps iterating their AI product. Samantha could be just another major (vis a vis SemVer) release. In Megacorp's testing, the AI was very convincing, and they believed they had a leg up on the competition. They hadn't realized just how effective their new software was though. In testing, the software's access was limited to the sandbox of the testing environment, which used samples of information. Once released on to the Internet, with access to a vast number of connections and information, the software reaches levels of convincingness (a proxy for intelligence) that the authors hadn't anticipated.

...but that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve spent all our time
mired in the world view of a neurotic middle class man whose only
real problems, and only real interest, are his dysfunctional
romantic relationships. Jonze has taken what would in truth be a
revolutionary event in human history and shrunk it down to an
episode of Dr. Phil.

I hate to be so cynical, but have a look at the world around us. Wouldn't it be so perfectly human of us (as a society on the whole) to overlook the emergence of true AI while we ponder our navel? That is exactly the type of complication that Samantha is referring to. We have the capacity for rationality, but we're not 100% rational. That's what makes us human. That is, IMO, a major theme of Her.

PS - I am 100% certain that somewhere in the societal background, there is a Hacker News that exists in the world of Her. This community identified that this new software was a "game changer" early on, and many arguments ensued with regard to how this new AI will impact the world. Society at large, failed to notice.