If you watched the film "Her" and thought you'd rather not wait for the future to get your heart broken by an operating system, Venmo co-founder Andrew Kortina is right there with you.
Kortina and Sam Lessin, former Facebook VP of product and co-founder of Drop.io, have started The Fin Exploration Company — one of whose main goals is to build “something like the OS from Her today.”
In a blog post, the founders describe their vision of the future as a time where people just talk to machines like they talk to people. “Mobile devices are extremely powerful, but apps are a crude method of communication,” they write.
And it seems they are already taking concrete steps to push past the "app" framework they criticize. According to the post, Kortina and Lessin have begun interacting with “Fin,” presumably their operating system, and it's already showing "Her"-like qualities.
“After interacting with Fin for a few weeks, I've been surprised to find that it does not feel like software. Fin feels like a person — actually, it feels like a multiplicity of people, almost like a city," they write.
"Fin grows and learns. Fin has an opinion. Fin surprises me and challenges me. Talking to Fin is a real conversation, not just a query and response or command dispatch.”
That certainly sounds intoxicating, and it’s easy to imagine some poor soul falling for this new operating system — eventually — in the way Joaquin Phoenix did in "Her." In the film, Phoenix ends with his heart smashed to bits as the operating system’s intelligence, Samantha, spirals out of his comprehension, and he realizes there can be nothing approximating human-to-human love with "her."
We have no word yet on how the Fin operating system actually works, and Lessin declined to comment to Business Insider for this article.
