In Her, the new film by Spike Jonze that recently closed out the New York Film Festival to considerable hurrahs, Sexiest Woman Alive Scarlett Johansson voices Samantha, a sentient, intuitive operating system that forms a romantic bond with a lonely writer played by Joaquin Phoenix.

The artificial construction of human social dynamics has long been a pet theme of Jonze's, from the inhabitable John Malkovich puppet of Being John Malkovich, to the seemingly organic screenplay that spurs the action in Adaptation, to his music video for Daft Punk's "Da Funk," which shoots a dog-headed any-schlub through a gauntlet of uncomfortable social interactions in an unforgiving Big City. This idea acquires its fullest expression in Samantha, an operating system that is capable not just of thinking but also feeling and learning, possessing a charming naivety that draws Phoenix's character to her ("I love the way you look at world," he tells her in the trailer). Much of that charm comes from Johansson herself, who voices Samantha not as some flat, authoritarian supercomputer, but as something inquisitive, funny, and trusting. Not as something at all, but as someone.

It got us thinking about some of the other more memorable turns of actors as disembodied computer voices, from across movies, TV, and video games.

Douglas Rain as HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey

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Of course this is the big boy, the A.I. by which all other A.I. (fictional and real) will be judged. The sentient supercomputer and primary villain of Kubrick's sci-fi odyssey, HAL set the template for computers teetering into madness. As voiced by Canadian actor Douglas Rain, an accomplished Shakespearean thespian, HAL's genteel lilt seems calculated to put the crew of the Jupiter-bound Discovery One spaceship at ease while his throbbing, unblinking red eye sees all. As HAL eventually goes off the rails, much despite himself, Rain makes the unfeeling A.I. seem sympathetic and, as he's eventually put offline by Keir Dullea's Dr. David Bowman, even pitiable.

Kevin Spacey as GERTY in Moon

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Duncan Jones's 2009 film relied on topsy-turvying the expectations established by many canon science-fiction films. Chief among these coy revisions was the character of GERTY, a sentient A.I. assisting Sam Rockwell's lunar miner. Spacey clearly takes his cues from Rain's performance in 2001 — the genteel inflections, the comforting use of name repetition — but the twist, such as it is, is that GERTY isn't an unhinged robot tyrant but actually a benevolent, even compassionate assistant to Rockwell's unraveling space-laborer.

Michal Jai White as SETH in Universal Solider: The Return

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Known for playing tough-guy comic-book and video-game heroes in movie adaptations of Spawn and Mortal Kombat, as well as real-life tough guy Mike Tyson in a 1995 HBO film, Michael Jai White was the perfect fit for a sequel to the 1992 Van Damme sci-fi actioner Universal Solider. Except Jai White's impressively sculpted body never makes it on screen until late into the film. Instead, he voices the Self Evolving Thought Helix (SETH), a computer network designed to control the souped-up next generation of genetically modified super-soldiers. With his gruff timbre, Jai provides SETH with a degree of menacing seriousness that's oddly out of place in a movie this stupid.

Stephen Merchant as Wheatley in Portal 2

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As the player's guide through Valve's first-person puzzle game Portal 2, British comedian Stephen Merchant (co-creator of the UK Office and star of the new HBO series Hello Ladies) helped invigorate what might otherwise be a dull, and in places exceptionally frustrating, gameplay experience. If sci-fi predictions of the eventual sentience and self-reliance of artificial intelligence are to be believed, then Merchant's fast-talking robotic orb represents the flipside of all the presumed super-intelligence, the point where the ability to think curdles into the ability to doubt oneself. Wheatley's inferiority complex comes to structure the game's story, as his charming neuroses eventually balloon into full-on megalomania that would make HAL-9000 blush (figuratively speaking).

Majel Barrett-Rodenberry as the on-board computer in Star Trek

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Voiced by Majel-Barrett Rodenberry, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry, the voice of the Enterprise's computer remained more-or-less consistent across all incarnations of Trek, providing the sense that these series existed in a shared universe. In a lot of ways, the Enterprise's computer feels like a model of Apple's (much clunkier) Siri: the chirpy female voice, the overeager helpfulness, the sometimes stymying usefulness ("insufficient data, please specify parameters"). Maybe there's something soothing and maternal (see also: A.I.s named "Mother" in John Carpenter's Dark Star and Ridley Scott's Alien) in a female voice that makes the various crews of the Enterprise, and us, feel safer, like we're being coddled by a computer that could, if it wanted to, destroy us at any time.

PLUS: Scarlett Johansson, Sexiest Woman Alive >>

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