“It might just be music to the ears of lovelorn geeks prepared to wait another 15 years to meet the love of their lives: a prominent futurologist has claimed that AI girlfriends (and presumably boyfriends) like the one played by Scarlett Johansson in the Oscar-nominated film Her could become a reality by 2029.

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and Google’s director of engineering makes the claim in a review of Spike Jonze’s much-praised sci-fi romance. In a post on his website, Kurzweil delivered a generally positive verdict on the film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man called Theodore who falls in love with his operating system, Samantha, before moving on to its technological implications.

“I would place some of the elements in Jonze’s depiction at around 2020 … such as the diffident and insulting video game character he interacts with and the pin-sized cameras that one can place like a freckle on one’s face,” wrote Kurzweil. “Other elements seem more like 2014, such as the flat-panel displays, notebooks and mobile devices.”* Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz (What The Flick?! TYT Sports), Gina Grad (The Gina Grad Show) and Jarrett Sleeper (Totally Clevver) break it down on The Young Turks.

*Read more here from Ben Child / The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/20/artificial-intelligence-ray-kurzweil-google-spike-jonze-her