Spike Jonze's Her, in which a man falls in love with his computer, was awarded Best Original Screenplay at last night's Academy Awards.
 The concept may seem laughable, but advances in artificial intelligence are bringing us closer to our machines than ever before, says Rhiannon Williams Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in Spike Jonze's Golden Globe nominated film Her Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in Spike Jonze's Golden Globe nominated film Her Photo: Warner/Everett/REX By Rhiannon Williams 11:33AM GMT 03 Mar 2014 Follow When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to hold conversations with a robot.
 Or to be precise, a chatterbot, a computer programme specifically designed to mimic human interaction through a series of exchanges.
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 While we were always aware we weren’t actually communicating with it, the novelty of appearing to ‘chat’ with a computer programme lead to over 30 million individuals adding SmarterChild as a contact on MSN messenger and AIM.
 In the 14 years since SmarterChild’s creation artificial intelligence has evolved exponentially, as has our attachment and reliance upon computers to run our lives.
 But could we ever actually develop feelings for them?
 This is the premise explored by Spike Jonze’s Her, which won Best Original Screenplay at last night’s Academy Awards Ceremony, in which Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with his operating system Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
 The genesis of Her was inspired by Cleverbot, a web application using a similar artificial intelligence algorithm to SmarterChild.
 In an interview last year with The Guardian, Jonze described the first 20 seconds of interacting with one of these bots as “a real buzz”.
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 But on the whole it’s an utterly absorbing love story which deconstructs the complexities of falling in love through the frame of technological innovation.
 Such is Samantha’s artificial intelligence, she longs to possess a physical body so she can walk around with Theodore and see the world as he does.
 I found myself able to suspend my disbelief he had developed feelings for a programme, given the tender nature of the pair’s interactions.
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 But in terms of having a romantic relationship with our technology, we’re still quite some way off.
” Owen explains the evolution of artificial intelligence is an extremely complex journey which began in the tail end of the 1950s.
 “By the 1970s, programmes could be created that could answer series of factual questions, but they were extremely limited.
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” One of Samantha’s most appealing aspects is her sense of humour (far from hampered by Johansson’s husky laugh).
 Expression of humour and creativity are the most challenging areas for artificial intelligence development, says Fenn, but that’s not to say it’s impossible.
 Samantha than any human woman he has ever loved “If a computer can learn what makes people laugh – and more importantly what makes you laugh – based on watching and analysing over time, there is no theoretical reason that a computer couldn’t eventually display and respond to humour.