Conclusion

Science fiction, which has often been identified as forward-looking, has long envisaged this kind of man-machine relationship. Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, already featured the 'supercomputer' HAL (if you take for each of the letters of this name the one that follows it in the alphabet, you will obtain... IBM), whose artificial intelligence enabled a 'natural' dialogue with humans. Closer to home, in 2013, Spike Jones' film Her tells the story of the love affair between a man and his virtual assistant named Samantha in the very near future, in a realistic and less futile way than it seems.